Map of New York City if sea levels rise 3 meters (areas underwater are in light blue).

Recent research on climate change has emphasized the fact that sea levels are rising quickly, and can have dangerous and costly impacts on human infrastructure.

Researchers are discovering just how costly climate change can be. On Monday, climate scientists at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research published a new study in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences that found that the economic costs of sea level rise increase more quickly than sea levels themselves.

“Our study illustrates that the complexity of climate change, adaptation, and flood damage can be disentangled by surprisingly simple mathematical functions,” said Markus Boettle, the lead author of the Potsdam Institute’s study, in a press release, “to provide estimates of the average annual costs of sea-level rise over a longer time period.”