Coastal Management Software to Support the Decision-Makers to Mitigate Coastal Erosion

Abstract

There are no sequential and integrated approaches that include the steps needed to perform an adequate management and planning of the coastal zones to mitigate coastal erosion problems and climate change effects. Important numerical model packs are available for users, but often looking deeply to the physical processes, demanding big computational efforts and focusing on specific problems. Thus, it is important to provide adequate tools to the decision-makers, which can be easily interpreted by populations, promoting discussions of optimal intervention scenarios in medium to long-term horizons. COMASO (coastal management software) intends to fill this gap, presenting a group of tools that can be applied in standalone mode, or in a sequential order. The first tool should map the coastal erosion vulnerability and risk, also including the climate change effects, defining a hierarchy of priorities where coastal defense interventions should be performed, or limiting/constraining some land uses or activities. In the locations identified as priorities, a more detailed analysis should consider the application of shoreline and cross-shore evolution models (second tool), allowing discussing intervention scenarios, in medium to long-term horizons. After the defined scenarios, the design of the intervention should be discussed, both in case of being a hard coastal structure or an artificial nourishment (third type of tools). Finally, a cost-benefit assessment tool should optimize the decisions, forecasting costs and benefits for each different scenario, through definition of economic values to the interventions and to the land/services/ecosystems, weighting all the environmental, cultural, social and historical aspects. It is considered that COMASO tools can help giving answers to the major problems of the coastal planning and management entities, integrating transversal knowledge in risk assessment, physical processes, engineering and economic evaluations. The integrated coastal zone management needs these tools to ensure sustainable coastal zones, mitigating erosion and climate change effects.

The Role of Traditional Knowledge in Coastal Adaptation Priorities: The Pamunkey Indian Reservation

“…Interested members of the Tribe may also collect their own monitoring data with sufficient training [15]. Although the utility of citizen science, such as crowdsourcing, in long-term data collection is not always reliable, tribes are expected to have above average results because of their sense of community and documented alignment of their perceived environmental contributors to and impacts of climate exacerbated hazards with data collected from instruments [18,20]. Though the attention on local hazards may not align fully with the approach of other scientific and government monitoring and mitigation approaches, the environmental data could be useful in relation to other collections, improving early warning systems, and other aspects of preparation and mitigation [10,17,24,25].…”

“…An understanding of the risk perceptions and tolerance of the implementing community is needed to assess the feasibility of adaptation or mitigation options [2,10,16]. Sustained stakeholder consultation and participation should guide priority setting, scenario evaluation, solution design, and resource allocation [16,[18][19][20][21]. Further, societal and ecosystem valuations should be conducted and periodically reviewed and realigned for the range of hazards present [16,18,22].…”

Medidas de mitigação e adaptação à erosão costeira e aos efeitos das alterações climáticas

“…A vulnerabilidade depende da predisposição do território para a erosão, naturalmente mais sensível quando a zona costeira arenosa apresenta elevada dependência de fontes aluvionares e está exposta a climas de agitação energéticos. A consequência da erosão depende do valor do território, considerando todos os fatores económicos, sociais, patrimoniais e/ou ambientais (Samuels e Gouldby, 2009;Coelho et al, 2020). As consequências da erosão costeira são principalmente avaliadas do ponto de vista material (danos em infraestruturas costeiras, perda de território, etc.…”

A Stepwise Approach to Beach Restoration at Calabaia Beach

“…In recent decades, coastal protection interventions have been planned following major sea calamities, but only focusing on the safety and protection of humans and economic resources, without taking into account the environmental needs of the land [28,29]. Nowadays, several maritime policies aim to protect coastal habitats and natural resources, promoting a sustainable use of land [30][31][32], following the guidelines of the sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-4, 2019, Nairobi, Kenya) and the Intergovernmental Conference (New York, 2019) concerning the law of the sea.…”