Up to 630 million people could be threatened by rising seas

Up to 630 million people are living on land threatened by flooding from sea level rises by the end of the century – three times as many as previously thought, according to a new analysis. The greatest increase in risk was found for communities living in Asian megacities, due to the way earlier estimates were worked out. It's a completely new perspective on the scale of this threat," says Benjamin Strauss at Climate Central, a New Jersey-based independent organisation. Previous calculations of the number of people at risk have been based on estimates of land elevation around the world using satellite data from NASA. But that approach gets confused by rooftops and forests, which can be mistaken for the ground, meaning a skyscraper-packed city such as Shanghai could look at a misleadingly low risk of flooding as seas rise.