Rising Sea: the engineering challenge

Rapidly rising sea levels across the globe potentially present society with a significant shift in one of the most fundamental of baselines, the height of high tide. This warrants a new perspective for numerous professions, but first and foremost for engineers, who have an unquestionable professional responsibility to take this knowledge into account when designing new buildings and engineered infrastructure and retrofits to those that already exist.

This report, discusses the findings of a “scoping exercise” undertaken by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to help the engineering community explore the professional response of this Institution to a sustained multi-metre sea level rise this century, of possibly up to 3 metres or more. The work was done as a collaborative project with the Rising Seas Institute (RSI),  and included input from individual members of a broad range of professional engineering institutions, as well as local and national government bodies, leading academics, and thought leaders on the topic, both in the UK and overseas.

This report presents a simple, pragmatic methodology that enables engineers to balance risk sensitivity (impact/probability) with anticipated design life in the determination of a ”worst-case” sea level rise for use in design calculations, as well as suggested adaptive engineering solutions to a range of potential impacts and initial pointers to existing advice and guidance. Recommendations to Government are finally formulated.