On Monday, scientists said that with the rise in sea levels, putting cities from New York to Shanghai in danger, the economic damage is going to increase even faster.

In a study, scientists wrote that severe floods whipped up by storms will become ever more costly for cities with the ocean levels edging up around the coasts worldwide in coming decades. The study may help guide governments in preparing a budget to save everything, ranging from buildings and basements to metro systems.

While speaking to Reuters, co-author Juergen Kropp, a member of a team at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said that the findings have shown that the damage from sea level rise increases at a fast pace in comparison to sea level rise itself.

The study estimated that for the Danish capital Copenhagen, for example, a moderate sea level increase of 11 cm by 2050 from 2010 levels would result into a billion euros per year as an additional damage in case no protective action is taken.

They mentioned in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences that unfortunately the costs would become four times, reaching to 4 billion euros, in case the rate of sea level rise nearly doubles to 25 cm by 2050, along with the worst scenarios estimated by a UN scientific panel.

The UN panel said that sea levels are creeping higher across the world partially because global warming has been melting glaciers from the Andes to the Alps and some areas of huge ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, adding water to the oceans

The Potsdam scientists mentioned that mathematical models created by them to estimate increasing costs would work worldwide. Kropp said, “You can apply it in Tokyo, New York or Mumbai”.