International Conference on Regional Sea Level Changes and Costal Impacts

Sea level change is already impacting coastal communities globally and will continue to do so. To meet urgent societal needs for useful information on sea level, the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) has established the theme “Regional Sea-Level Change and Coastal Impacts”, as one of its cross-cutting “Grand Challenge” (GC) science questions.

The GC Sea Level has designed and developed an integrated interdisciplinary program on sea level research reaching from the global to the regional and coastal scales. In particular, the program aims for close interaction with relevant coastal stakeholders to make sure that the results effectively support impact and adaptation efforts and wider coastal zone development and management.

The WCRP, jointly with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC), is organizing an international conference on sea level research that will address the existing challenges in describing and predicting regional sea level changes, and in quantifying the intrinsic uncertainties. It follows 11 years after the first WCRP sea level conference (Paris, 2006), and three years after the last Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will provide a comprehensive summary of the state of worldwide climate-related large scale sea level research.

The conference is a 5-day event with a leading theme guiding the activities of each day. The structure of the conference will consist of plenary sessions followed by extensive poster sessions. In the evenings we are planning to hold "think-tanks" focusing on new science frontiers and activities.