  Sea-level rise poses considerable risks to coastal communities, ecosystems,
and infrastructure. Decision makers are faced with uncertain sea-level
projections when designing a strategy for coastal adaptation. The traditional
methods are often silent on tradeoffs as well as the effects of tail-area
events and of potential future learning. Here we reformulate a simple sea-level
rise adaptation model to address these concerns. We show that Direct Policy
Search yields improved solution quality, with respect to Pareto-dominance in
the objectives, over the traditional approach under uncertain sea-level rise
projections and storm surge. Additionally, the new formulation produces high
quality solutions with less computational demands than an intertemporal
optimization approach. Our results illustrate the utility of multi-objective
adaptive formulations for the example of coastal adaptation and point to
wider-ranging application in climate change adaptation decision problems.
