Where climate change is a near-term planning problem
10 Cities Most at Risk From Rising Sea Levels
Major coastal cities now plan around sea-level scenarios their grandparents would have called science fiction. Here are ten of the most exposed.
About 10% of the world's population lives less than 10 metres above sea level. Even moderate climate-change scenarios put hundreds of millions of city residents in trouble within the lifetime of children born today.
How we chose these ↓ — jump to the full scoring system at the bottom of the article.
Bangkok, Thailand · pop. 5,527,948
Bangkok is sinking 1–2 cm a year on its soft Chao Phraya delta clay. Combined with sea-level rise, this may force the city to consider partial relocation or large-scale dike investment later this century.
The World Bank's Thailand Country Climate and Development Report identifies Bangkok as one of the most exposed megacities globally. The city is also featured on our best nightlife and cities built on water lists.
Greater Accra, Ghana · pop. 2,388,000
Ghana's capital has already lost several coastal fishing communities to erosion, particularly along the eastern Keta and Ada coastline. The rest of the city sits dangerously close to the high-water mark, and informal settlements are particularly exposed.
The World Bank-funded West Africa Coastal Areas Management Programme (WACA) covers Accra and several other West African capitals. Ghana's per-capita climate adaptation funding remains far below need.
Alexandria, Egypt · pop. 4,546,231
Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, may lose much of its coastline within decades. The historic Corniche is already eroding, and UNESCO has flagged the city's archaeological sites (including the underwater Pharos lighthouse remnants) as climate-threatened.
The Egyptian government has installed extensive concrete tetrapods along the seafront as a stopgap. Sea-level projections for the southern Mediterranean are particularly steep over the next century.
North Holland, Netherlands · pop. 881,933
The Netherlands has been managing rising water for 800 years and is generally regarded as the world's best at it. But projected sea-level rise of up to a metre by 2100 is forcing new investments in dikes, dunes and storm-surge barriers all over again under the Deltaplan programme.
Nearly all of the Randstad — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht — is built on land below mean sea level. Rijkswaterstaat operates the world's most ambitious civil flood-protection infrastructure.
Louisiana, United States
Much of New Orleans is already below sea level, kept dry by a 350-mile system of levees, floodwalls and pumps that has been rebuilt and reinforced repeatedly since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The US Army Corps of Engineers' Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System is now one of the largest single flood-defence projects in the world.
Louisiana is also losing roughly a football field of coastal land per hour to subsidence and erosion, which removes the natural storm buffer in front of the city.
Florida, United States · pop. 487,006
Miami's porous limestone bedrock means seawalls don't really work — water rises through the rock from below. 'Sunny-day flooding' during the highest tides is already routine in the lowest streets of Miami Beach and parts of downtown.
The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact projects 25–80 cm of sea-level rise by 2070. Miami-Dade County's stormwater infrastructure upgrade programme is one of the largest in the US, with cumulative costs estimated in the billions.
West Bengal, India · pop. 4,486,679
Kolkata sits on the Hooghly distributary of the Ganges delta. The combination of land subsidence (driven partly by groundwater extraction), sea-level rise and tropical cyclone intensification puts the city at the top of nearly every Asian climate-risk list, including the Verisk Maplecroft Climate Change Vulnerability Index.
Cyclone Amphan in 2020 was a preview of the kind of storm-surge events the city will face more often.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · pop. 14,002,598
The Climate Central 2019 reanalysis using CoastalDEM elevation data found that almost half of Ho Chi Minh City could be regularly flooded by 2050 under mid-range climate scenarios. The Mekong Delta around the city is also sinking due to upstream sediment loss from hydroelectric dams.
The city has implemented a series of flood-defence and pumping upgrades, but the financial and engineering challenge is enormous.
Dhaka, Bangladesh · pop. 21,741,000
Dhaka sits on one of the world's largest and lowest river deltas; even small sea-level rises combined with monsoon flooding threaten to displace tens of millions of Bangladeshis. The World Bank's 2023 Groundswell report estimates Bangladesh could see 13.3 million climate migrants by 2050, most flowing toward Dhaka.
The city is already the world's densest megacity and is absorbing roughly 400,000 internal climate migrants a year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Jakarta, Indonesia · pop. 10,467,629
Jakarta is sinking up to 25 cm a year in its worst-affected northern districts, driven primarily by groundwater extraction by an overstretched water utility. The Indonesian government is now relocating the national capital to Nusantara in East Kalimantan precisely because Jakarta's defensibility is in question.
The Giant Sea Wall (NCICD) project, planned to wrap the bay, has been under discussion for over a decade with limited construction so far. UN-Habitat ranks Jakarta among the most sea-level-vulnerable megacities on Earth.
How we chose these
We synthesised three major risk datasets: Climate Central's CoastalDEM-based reanalysis of populations exposed to sea-level rise, the OECD's ranking of port cities exposed to coastal flooding (Hanson et al.), and the Verisk Maplecroft Climate Change Vulnerability Index. Cities were included if they appeared in the top tier of all three for combined exposure (population at risk + assets at risk + adaptive capacity gap). The list is intentionally diverse geographically rather than ordered strictly by exposure magnitude.
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For entertainment only. Rankings on this page are editorial picks compiled from public sources for fun and discovery — they aren't a scientific measurement. Population figures and place details come from open data; see the linked place pages for sources.