Assessment of Impact of Sea Level Rise in Sorong City, West Papua, Indonesia

Abstract

Rising sea level due to global warming potentially poses a threat to many coastal areas. Coastal cities with dense population and small islands are more vulnerable in terms of location. A study has been carried out to assess the impact of sea level rise in Sorong City and the small islands surrounding the city. By analyzing tidal data from 1985-2006 gathered from Bakosurtanal (Coordination Agency for Survey and Mapping). the mean annual sea level rise has been estimated at about 0.54 cm'year. A Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the city was subjected to three different flooding scenarios to demonstrate maximum average. and minimum condition of possible sea level rise due to global warming. The elevation class maps were overlaid with the land use data result from the supervised classification Landsat-7 ETM-image. The areas of specific land use types that fall within a certain elevation class were calculated. The result showed that the residential areas will be the hardest hit in terms of land area folloed by the industrial areas and agricultural areas. The impact of flooding to the population and land will be very enormous.