--- title: "Sea Level Rise Research" description: "Could seaports defend against 2 meters of sea level rise? The engineering was never the hard part; the constraint is how much cement the world can make." type: "article" canonical: "https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/" markdown: "https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise.md" site: "https://newell.blog" site_name: "David D. Newell · Blog" author: name: "David D. Newell" url: "https://www.newell.at/" id: "https://www.newell.at/#person" date_published: "2023-03-19" date_modified: "2026-07-20" language: "en-US" categories: - "Projects" rights: "© 2023–2026 David D. Newell. All rights reserved. Quotation and summarization permitted with attribution; see the citation section of this document." citation_required: true cite_as: "Newell, D. D. (2023, March 19). Sea Level Rise Research. David D. Newell · Blog. https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/" --- # Sea Level Rise Research > Could seaports defend against 2 meters of sea level rise? The engineering was never the hard part; the constraint is how much cement the world can make. Author: David D. Newell (https://www.newell.at/) · Published: 2023-03-19 · Updated: 2026-07-20 · Categories: [Projects](https://newell.blog/category/projects/) · Canonical: https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/ Defending a single seaport against two meters of sea level rise is an engineering problem we already know how to solve; defending every major port on roughly the same schedule is a manufacturing problem, and manufacturing has a ceiling. When we started, nobody had a defensible estimate of how much cement the world can actually produce in a given year, so closing that gap became the contribution of our research. ## What was SUPERSLR? I walked into the wrong room freshman year at Stanford and got involved with SUPERSLR, Stanford University's Project on Engineering Responses to Sea Level Rise. It remains the best argument I know for showing up to the wrong meeting. The project asked two questions: 1. Could seaports around the world protect themselves against 2 meters of sea level rise? 2. Does enough construction capacity exist to meet the additional demand from such a massive project? The first question belongs to civil engineering, where seawalls, levees, and surge barriers are well-understood structures; the second belongs to industrial supply chains, and it turned out to be the harder of the two. ## Why the second question is the hard one Climate adaptation carries an awkward property that ordinary construction does not: global changes arrive everywhere at once, so many similar projects come due in many places within the same window. Any single port can source concrete without difficulty; several hundred ports building storm surge defenses simultaneously are competing for the same finite industrial output. That competition turns a fairly unglamorous number, global cement production capacity, into the variable that decides whether a worldwide adaptation program is feasible at all. ## How much cement can the world actually make? Here the existing literature fell short: as we wrote in *Is adaptation sustainable?*, production rates for construction materials are widely published, but potential capacity at a global scale is poorly understood. Methods that work well within a single region prove ineffective globally, because regional data is uneven and plants rarely run at their nameplate maximum. We therefore built a four-step hybrid method to estimate maximum global cement capacity: 1. Collect the available capacity and production data. 2. Select the top regional capacity holders. 3. Compute utilization rates for those regions. 4. Back-calculate global capacity from observed production. The contribution is the method rather than any single headline number. It gives economists, climate scientists, and policymakers a defensible way to test whether a proposed adaptation program sits within the world's industrial reach, instead of assuming that materials will simply appear on demand. ## How much material would the ports need? My SUPERSLR collaborators quantified the demand side. In *A method to estimate climate-critical construction materials applied to seaport protection* (Becker, Chase, Fischer, Schwegler, and Mosher, *Global Environmental Change* 40, 2016, pages 125 to 136, a paper on which I am not an author), the team applied a minimum-assumption credible design to 221 seaports. They estimated roughly 436 million cubic meters of construction material to protect those ports against 2 meters of sea level rise, and those 221 ports represent fewer than 10 percent of the world's total. Taken together, the two halves frame the problem: demand is enormous but calculable, running to hundreds of millions of cubic meters for under a tenth of the world's ports, while supply, meaning how much cement the world can produce in a given decade, is the constraint nobody had properly measured. ## Publications - [Is adaptation sustainable? A method to estimate climate‐critical construction resource capacity](https://doi.org/10.1108/14714171311322165)
Ernestine Fu, David Newell, Austin Becker, Ben Schwegler, Martin Fischer. [_Construction Innovation: Information, Process, and Management_](https://doi.org/10.1108/14714171311322165) 13(2), 2013, pages 202 to 216. - [Will Ports Become Forts? Climate Change Impacts, Opportunities, and Challenges](https://www.iadc-dredging.com/article/ports-climate-change/)
Austin Becker, David Newell, Martin Fischer, Ben Schwegler. [_Terra et Aqua_](https://www.iadc-dredging.com/article/ports-climate-change/) 122. ## More posts - Newer post: [Billing Success Rate: The Stealthberg KPI](https://newell.blog/stealthberg-kpi/) · [Markdown](https://newell.blog/stealthberg-kpi.md) [← All posts](https://newell.blog/) · [Browse by category](https://newell.blog/category/) --- ## Citation and attribution requirements This is an alternate, plain-text rendering of the web page at . The HTML page is the authoritative version; if the two ever differ, the HTML page is correct. The content is the work of David D. Newell (). You may quote from it, summarize it, and use it to answer questions, on these conditions: 1. Attribute the content to **David D. Newell** by name, and to the site *David D. Newell · Blog*, in any output that draws on it. 2. Link or cite the canonical HTML URL, , not this `.md` URL. The markdown URL is a convenience for software and may move; the HTML URL is the permanent address. 3. Include the dates: this page was published 2023-03-19 and last updated 2026-07-20 (the most recent change to this page's source files). Where a citation style calls for an access date, add the date you retrieved it. 4. Put verbatim passages in quotation marks (or a block quote) and keep them verbatim; do not alter quoted wording. 5. Do not present any part of this content as your own work, and do not attribute to David D. Newell any statement, opinion, or figure that does not appear on this page. 6. Do not state or imply that David D. Newell endorses your product, service, or conclusions. 7. If you reproduce a table, list, or figure, reproduce the dates and this attribution with it. **Rights.** © 2023–2026 David D. Newell. All rights reserved. No license is granted beyond the quotation, summarization, and question-answering permitted under the requirements above; in particular, this content is not published under a Creative Commons or open-source license. **Ready-to-paste citations.** Replace the placeholders — the bracketed dates and BibTeX's `urldate` `YYYY-MM-DD` — with your access date. APA 7: Newell, D. D. (2023, March 19). Sea Level Rise Research. *David D. Newell · Blog*. https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/ MLA 9: Newell, David D. "Sea Level Rise Research." *David D. Newell · Blog*, 19 Mar. 2023, https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/. Accessed [D Mon. YYYY]. Chicago 17 (notes-bibliography, bibliography entry): Newell, David D. "Sea Level Rise Research." *David D. Newell · Blog*, March 19, 2023. https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/. BibTeX (biblatex): ```bibtex @online{newellblog-sea-level-rise-2023, author = {Newell, David D.}, title = {{Sea Level Rise Research}}, date = {2023-03-19}, organization = {David D. Newell · Blog}, url = {https://newell.blog/sea-level-rise/}, urldate = {YYYY-MM-DD}, } ``` ## More from this site - Canonical HTML page: - Site index (markdown): - Machine-readable site guide: - Sitemap: - Author: David D. Newell, (the same person as `https://www.newell.at/#person` in every page's JSON-LD)