Jack Heslop

Jack Heslop holds a one-year contract with the Tyndall Centre, contributing to the EU Horizon 2020 PROTECT project. The project’s main objective is to enhance our understanding of global and local sea level rise projections across various timescales – 50 years, 100 years, out ideally over multiple centuries to 2300. The main uncertainties over these long timescales relate to the response of the large ice sheets to global warming. Jack’s role within the project is to explore the implications of these new sea level rise projections on coastal communities worldwide. This will be achieved by: assessing human exposure to coastal flood hazards up to 2300, examining the economic and broader consequences of different adaptation strategies such as retreat versus defence, including projecting potential migration trends from coastal zones. The team has identified socio-economic scenarios to 2300 and these demographic and economic trends will inform the analysis in an exploratory manner. To achieve these aims, Jack is employing integrated modelling techniques that merge the sea level projections generated by the project with the demographic forecasts and economic methodologies, providing insights into the possible future of global coastal communities and some of the fundamental choices they might face.