How developed is the South African coast? Baseline extent of South Africa's coastal and estuarine infrastructure

Claassens, Louw; Villiers, N.M. de; Waltham, Nathan J.

doi:10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2022.106112

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The clustering of coastal infrastructure around populous and port cities is a global pattern (e.g., Dafforn et al 2015;Firth et al 2016Firth et al , 2024Floerl et al 2021;Claassens et al 2022). Accordingly, coastal hardening is advanced in the central region of the SP coast, which concentrated 63% (154 km) of the total extent of AS measured in this study.…”

Section: Coastal Hardening In Spmentioning

confidence: 52%

Urbanisation on the coastline of the most populous and developed state of Brazil: the extent of coastal hardening and occupations in low-elevation zones

Pardal,

Christofoletti,

Martinez

2024

Anthropocene Coasts

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Worldwide, coastlines have been replaced and altered by hard infrastructures to protect cities and accommodate human activities. In addition, human settlements are common and increasing in lowland areas threatened by coastal risk hazards. These urbanisation processes cause severe socioeconomic and ecological losses which demand policy reforms towards better coastal management and climate resilience. A first step in that direction is to comprehend the status of coastal hardening and occupation of vulnerable areas. Here, we mapped the coastline of the most populous and developed state of Brazil: São Paulo (SP). Our goal was to quantify the linear extent of natural habitats, artificial structures (AS), and occupations in low-elevation coastal zones (≤ 5 m) within 100 m from marine environments (LECZ100m) along the coastline and within estuaries. SP coast has a total extent of 244 km of AS, of which 125 and 119 km correspond to AS running along the coastline (e.g., seawalls, breakwaters) and extending from the shoreline into adjacent waters (e.g., jetties, pontoons, groynes), respectively. 63% of the total extent of AS is located in the most urbanised region. Breakwalls were the most common infrastructure (108 km), followed by jetties and wharves (~40 km each), and aquaculture and fishing apparatus (~24 km). Over 300 km of the SP coastline has inland occupations in LECZ100m: 235 and 67 km are adjacent to sandy beaches and estuarine/river margins, respectively. Coastal hardening is advanced in the central region of SP resulting from intense port activities and armoured shorelines. In other regions, much of coastal urbanisation seems to be driven by secondary usage of the cities, such as real estate development for beach houses and tourism. Our findings suggest that coastal urbanisation poses a major but often neglected source of environmental impact and risk hazards in SP and Brazil.

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Section: Coastal Hardening In Spmentioning

confidence: 52%

Urbanisation on the coastline of the most populous and developed state of Brazil: the extent of coastal hardening and occupations in low-elevation zones

Pardal,

Christofoletti,

Martinez

2024

Anthropocene Coasts

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“…Firth et al ( 2020) also suggested that coastal African countries that are experiencing rapid population growth are the most vulnerable to future habitat loss. Whilst Claassens et al (2022) only found that 2.9% of the 3000-km South African coastline is armoured this number is likely to be much higher given the large number of informal settlements. Further armoring is likely in the future due to growing urban populations and additional pressure from Operation Phakisa to transform the South African coastal environment to unlock the 'blue economy' (Loureiro et al, 2022).…”

Section: Boxes Box 1 the Palm Effectmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…-Document levers that could support GGI (Naylor et al, 2012, Pioch et al, 2018Evans et al, 2019;Mayer-Pinto et al, 2017;Claassens et al, 2022).…”

Section: Limitedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coastal greening of grey infrastructure: an update on the state-of-the-art

Firth,

Bone,

Bartholomew

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Maritime En

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In the marine environment, greening of grey infrastructure (GGI) is a rapidly growing field that attempts to encourage native marine life to colonize marine artificial structures to enhance biodiversity, thereby promoting ecosystem functioning and hence service provision. By designing multifunctional sea defences, breakwaters, port complexes and off-shore renewable energy installations, these structures can yield myriad environmental benefits, in particular, addressing UN SDG 14: Life below water. Whilst GGI has shown great promise and there is a growing evidence base, there remain many criticisms and knowledge gaps, and some feel that there is scope for GGI to be abused by developers to facilitate harmful development. Given the surge of research in this field in recent years, it is timely to review the literature to provide an update update on the state-of-the-art of the field in relation to the many criticisms and identify remaining knowledge gaps. Despite the rapid and significant advances made in this field, there is currently a lack of science and practice outside of academic sectors in the developed world, and there is a collective need for schemes that encourage intersectoral and transsectoral research, knowledge exchange, and capacity building to optimize GGI in the pursuit of contributing to sustainable development.

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“…We identified nearly 12,000 private docks across six counties in that study, which inspired us to examine the historical development of these structures. While some studies have examined the current extent of coastal infrastructure in marine systems at the local 27 , 28 , national 29 – 31 , and international 32 , 33 scale, few focus on the historical progression of coastal infrastructure 34 . Additionally, most investigations have focused on large industrial infrastructure or armoring and do not quantify the extent of private, personal WAI.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exponential growth of private coastal infrastructure influenced by geography and race in South Carolina, USA

Beauvais,

Markley,

Byers

2024

Sci Rep

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Homeowners in coastal environments often augment their access to estuarine ecosystems by building private docks on their personal property. Despite the commonality of docks, particularly in the Southeastern United States, few works have investigated their historical development, their distribution across the landscape, or the environmental justice dimensions of this distribution. In this study, we used historic aerial photography to track the abundance and size of docks across six South Carolina counties from the 1950s to 2016. Across our roughly 60-year study period, dock abundance grew by two orders of magnitude, mean length of newly constructed docks doubled, and the cumulative length of docks ballooned from 34 to 560 km. Additionally, we drew on census data interpolated into consistent 2010 tract boundaries to analyze the racial and economic distribution of docks in 1994, 1999, 2011, and 2016. Racial composition, measured as the percentage of a tract’s population that was White, positively correlated with dock abundance in each year. Median household income and dock abundance were only correlated in 2011. Taken together, these metrics indicate the growing desire for direct estuary access, however, that access does not appear to be equally spread across racial groups. Because docks enhance estuarine access and demarcate private property, our study provides longitudinal insights into environmental justice concerns related to disparate private property ownership. We found a persistent correlation between the racial characteristics of an area and dock abundance, strongly indicating that White South Carolinians have had disproportionately greater private water access for the past two decades.

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How developed is the South African coast? Baseline extent of South Africa's coastal and estuarine infrastructure

Cited by 6 publications

References 60 publications

Urbanisation on the coastline of the most populous and developed state of Brazil: the extent of coastal hardening and occupations in low-elevation zones

Urbanisation on the coastline of the most populous and developed state of Brazil: the extent of coastal hardening and occupations in low-elevation zones

Coastal greening of grey infrastructure: an update on the state-of-the-art

Exponential growth of private coastal infrastructure influenced by geography and race in South Carolina, USA

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