Hurricanes, Floods and Rising Seas: The Threats Coastal Communities Face

Living on the coast means living with two kinds of danger. One arrives suddenly — hurricanes, coastal storms, tsunamis and landslides. The other creeps in over years: coastal erosion and rising seas. Both can cost lives and livelihoods, and the second is easy to underestimate because its losses are still mostly in the future.

Coastal flooding. Floods are the most frequent natural disaster. Credit: NOAA.

The sudden threats

Flooding is the most frequent natural disaster: one in three federal disaster declarations is related to it. And when a catastrophic event strikes, the losses can be enormous. The 2005 hurricane season, which included Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, caused $200 billion in economic losses — the costliest season ever.

The slow threat

For some threats, like sea level rise, the losses are still projections. Coastal marshes show how large they could be. The vast majority of the nation's commercial and recreational fisheries depend on these marshes, and about two-thirds of those fisheries spend some stage of their lives in tidal marshes. As the sea rises, marshes would normally move inland — but where the land behind them is built up, they have nowhere to go. The result would be billions of dollars in economic impacts on the livelihoods and sustainability of many coastal communities.

Different coasts, different dangers

The threats vary across the United States:

Building communities that bounce back

The answer is to build hazard-resilient communities — places prepared for these threats and able to absorb the impacts and recover. That preparation saves lives in disasters, protects the economic stability of coastal communities and supports the health of coastal ecosystems, including the wetlands that are essential for reducing the impact of storms.

Sources

Based on "What threats do coastal communities face?" from NOAA's National Ocean Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.