The cost of not holding back the sea—economic vulnerability

A method for quantifying the economic vulnerability of developed shoreline to the threat of greenhouse induced sea level rise is described and applied to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, USA. While the method carefully accounts for structure, land and beach vulnerability along arbitrary sea level rise scenarios from tax maps and careful geographical accounting, it does not produce opportunity cost estimates for abandonment. The data generated here are, nonetheless, the foundation from which such cost estimates can be constructed given market and individual reactions to subjective perceptions of the threat and its timing.