ABSTRACT
The growing coastal risk exposure thus emerges as the poster child of one of hazard management's greatest risk conundrums, namely: how to reduce current and future exposure to a hazard when past investments and current demographic, socio-economic, political, and climatic trends all "conspire" to place more people and more things people value in harm's way. This chapter focuses on the US and lay out some of the drivers behind this risk conundrum, clarify why we cannot avoid dealing with it, and open up the discussion of how to intervene in this complex system in order to avoid catastrophic losses of lives and resources in the future. There is an internally consistent logic to the dynamics that have created the coastal risk conundrum, whereby accelerating sea-level rise combines with the underlying demographic, economic, legal, administrative, political, and social drivers so as to create the worst possible sequence of outcomes.
