Using an Urban Growth Model Framework to Project the Impacts of Climate Change on Coastal Populations

Coastal populations are facing increasing environmental stress from coastal hazards including sea level rise and increasing tidal ranges and storm surges from hurricanes. The East and Gulf Coasts of the United States (U.S.) are projected to face high rates of sea level rise and include many of the U.S.’s largest urban populations. This study proposes modelling land-use change and coastal change between 1996-2019 to project the impacts of intensifying coastal hazards on the U.S. Gulf and East Coast populations and to estimate how coastal populations are growing or retreating from high-risk areas. The primary objective is to develop a multifaceted spatial-temporal (MuST) framework to model coastal change through land-use projections and thorough analysis of the indicators of coastal urban growth or retreat. While urban growth models exist, one that presents an interdisciplinary evaluation of potential growth and retreat due to geographic factors and coastal hazards has not been released.
This study proposes modelling urban growth using geospatial metrics including topographic slope, topographic elevation, distance to existing urban areas, distance to existing roads, and distance to the coast. The model will also use historic hurricane data, including storm track and footprint for named storms between 1996-2019 and the associated flood claims data from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to account for existing impacts from coastal storms. Additionally, climate change data including sea level rise projections and future tidal ranges will be incorporated to accurately project the impacts of future coastal hazards on urban expansion over the next 30 years (2020-2050). The basis of the urban growth model compares land-use change between 1996-2019 to complete a geospatial analysis of both the areas shifting from rural (agricultural, forest, wetlands) to urban indicating growth and population data from 2000-2020 to evaluate coastal retreat or abandonment over the next 30 years.