It's Nature week

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Something amazing happened this week: two publications with my name on it came out in Nature! 

First, I wrote an explained of a recent paper by Sally Brown and colleagues in Earth's Future for Nature News & Views.

What I found really cool about their paper, is that it not only shows the impact of future sea-level rise on the size of the flooding area and the amount of people impacted, but also the reverse: how people can have an impact on the amount of sea-level change by taking action. Their paper shows that the sooner we manage to cap our greenhouse gas emissions, the less sea-level rise we'll get.

 Second, I am a co-author on a paper led by Chris Perry, on how coral reefs are losing the ability to keep track with sea-level rise. 

 In this paper, we compared the vertical growth rate potential of over 200 tropical reefs to recent and projected rates of sea-level change. From this, we find that few reefs will have the capacity to keep tracking sea-level rise. This will lead to the reefs being deeper under water, which in turn reduces their natural wave-breaking abilities and therefore increases coastal erosion and flooding risk. Again, this points to the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improving local water quality to reduce environmental pressures on the reefs.

A selection of the news coverage of the Perry et al. paper:

International
National (in Dutch)
And to top it off we made it to the cover of the paper issue!