William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science has issued its latest annual sea-level “report card,” which provides U.S. coastal communities from Maine to Alaska with a localized projection of sea-level change to 2050.

The project’s founder, VIMS emeritus professor Dr. John Boon, said, “This year’s report cards are especially informative when compared to the global projections issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last August as part of its latest assessment report.”

The latest IPCC report—the sixth in a series dating to 1990—forecasts seven to nine additional inches of global sea-level rise by 2050, in addition to the eight-inch rise observed during the last century. The IPCC will meet again to approve its Summary for Policymakers—a distillation of the full August report that governments worldwide rely on to inform efforts for reducing vulnerability to sea-level rise and other global warming impacts.East Coast trends

Sea-level rise has now b...