scholarly journals A Stepwise Approach to Beach Restoration at Calabaia Beach

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 2677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Maiolo ◽  
Riccardo Alvise Mel ◽  
Salvatore Sinopoli
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Hazards ◽  
Coastal Protection ◽  
Stepwise Approach ◽  
Strategic Resources ◽  
Erosion Processes ◽  
Blue Growth ◽  
Marine Economy ◽  
Emergency Interventions ◽  
Flooding Events ◽  
The Impact

Sea hazards are increasingly threatening worldwide coastal areas, which are among the most strategic resources of the Earth in supporting human population, economy and the environment. These hazards enhance erosion processes and flooding events, producing severe socio-economic impacts and posing a challenge to ocean engineers and stakeholders in finding the optimal strategy to protect both the coastal communities and the health of the environment. The impact of coastal hazards is actually worsened not only by an enhancing rate of relative sea level rise and storminess driven by climate changes, but also by increasing urban pressure related to the development of the sea economy. With regard to larger environmental awareness and climate change adaptation needs, the present study focuses on a stepwise approach that supports the actions for coastal protection at Calabaia Beach, which is located in the Marine Experimental Station of Capo Tirone (Cosenza, Italy). These actions first aim to protect humans and coastal assets, then to restore the environment and the local habitat, overcoming the need for the emergency interventions carried out in the last decades and pointing out that healthy ecosystems are more productive and support a sustainable marine economy (“Blue Growth”).

scholarly journals Resilience from coastal protection

2015 ◽  
Vol 373 (2053) ◽  
pp. 20140383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley C. Ewing
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Coastal Communities ◽  
Coastal Hazards ◽  
Community Safety ◽  
Coastal Protection ◽  
Shore Protection ◽  
Coastal Community ◽  
Effective Community ◽  
Key Aspects

Coastal areas are important residential, commercial and industrial areas; but coastal hazards can pose significant threats to these areas. Shoreline/coastal protection elements, both built structures such as breakwaters, seawalls and revetments, as well as natural features such as beaches, reefs and wetlands, are regular features of a coastal community and are important for community safety and development. These protection structures provide a range of resilience to coastal communities. During and after disasters, they help to minimize damages and support recovery; during non-disaster times, the values from shoreline elements shift from the narrow focus on protection. Most coastal communities have limited land and resources and few can dedicate scarce resources solely for protection. Values from shore protection can and should expand to include environmental, economic and social/cultural values. This paper discusses the key aspects of shoreline protection that influence effective community resilience and protection from disasters. This paper also presents ways that the economic, environmental and social/cultural values of shore protection can be evaluated and quantified. It presents the Coastal Community Hazard Protection Resilience (CCHPR) Index for evaluating the resilience capacity to coastal communities from various protection schemes and demonstrates the use of this Index for an urban beach in San Francisco, CA, USA.

Bankruptcy filings, flooding, real estate prices and Leading Index

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Billie Ann Brotman
Keyword(s):  
Housing Prices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Flood Insurance ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Personal Bankruptcy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Independent Variables ◽  
Flooding Event ◽  
Flooding Events ◽  
The Impact

PurposeFlood damage to uninsured single-family homes shifts the entire burden of costly repairs onto the homeowner. Homeowners in the United States and in much of Europe can purchase flood insurance. The Netherlands and Asian countries generally do not offer flood insurance protection to homeowners. Uninsured households incur the entire cost of repairing/replacing properties damaged due to flooding. Homeowners’ policies do not cover damage caused by flooding. The paper examines the link between personal bankruptcy and the severity of flooding events, property prices and financial condition levels.Design/methodology/approachA fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) regression model is developed which uses personal bankruptcy filings as its dependent variable during the years 2000 through 2018. This time-series model considers the association between personal bankruptcy court filings and costly, widespread flooding events. Independent variables were selected that potentially act as mitigating factors reducing bankruptcy filings.FindingsThe FMOLS regression results found a significant, positive association between flooding events and the total number of personal bankruptcy filings. Higher flooding costs were associated with higher bankruptcy filings. The Home Price Index is inversely related to the bankruptcy dependent variable. The R-squared results indicate that 0.65% of the movement in the dependent variable personal bankruptcy filings is explained by the severity of a flooding event and other independent variables.Research limitations/implicationsThe severity of the flooding event is measured using dollar losses incurred by the National Flood Insurance program. A macro-case study was undertaken, but the research results would have been enhanced by examining local areas and demographic factors that may have made bankruptcy filing following a flooding event more or less likely.Practical implicationsThe paper considers the impact of the natural disaster flooding on bankruptcy rates filings. The findings may have implications for multi-family properties as well as single-family housing. Purchasing flood insurance generally mitigates the likelihood of severe financial risk to the property owner.Social implicationsNatural flood insurance is underwritten by the federal government and/or by private insurers. The financial health of private property insurers that underwrite flooding and their ability to meet losses incurred needs to be carefully scrutinized by the insured.Originality/valuePrior studies analyzing the linkages existing between housing prices, natural disasters and bankruptcy used descriptive data, mostly percentages, when considering this association. The study herein posits the same questions as these prior studies but used regression analysis to analyze the linkages. The methodology enables additional independent variables to be added to the analysis.

A multi-decade assessment of the impact of large fire events on sediment redistribution using LAPSUS - the Águeda catchment, north-central Portugal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dante Föllmi ◽  
Jantiene Baartman ◽  
João Pedro Nunes ◽  
Akli Benali
Keyword(s):  
Soil Depth ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Fire Severity ◽  
Sediment Dynamics ◽  
Land Uses ◽  
Erosion Rates ◽  
Erosion Processes ◽  
Sediment Redistribution ◽  
Central Portugal ◽  
The Impact

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>Wildfires have become an increasing threat for Mediterranean ecosystems, due to increasing climate change induced wildfire activity and changing land management practices. Apart from the initial risk, fire can alter the soil in various ways depending on different fire severities and thus post-fire erosion processes are an important component in assessing wildfires’ negative effects. Recent post-fire erosion (modelling) studies often focus on a short time window and lack the attention for sediment dynamics at larger spatial scales. Yet, these large spatial and temporal scales are fundamental for a better understanding of catchment sediment dynamics and long-term destructive effects of multiple fires on post-fire erosion processes. In this study the landscape evolution model LAPSUS was used to simulate erosion and deposition in the 404 km<sup>2</sup> Águeda catchment in northern-central Portugal over a 41 year (1979-2020) timespan. To include variation in fire severity and its impact on the soil four burnt severity classes, represented by the difference Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), were parameterized. Although model calibration was difficult due to lack of spatial and temporal measured data, the results show that average post-fire net erosion rates were significantly higher in the wildfire scenarios (5.95 ton ha<sup>-1</sup> yr<sup>-1</sup>) compared to those of a non-wildfire scenario (0.58 ton ha<sup>-1</sup> yr<sup>-1</sup>). Furthermore, erosion values increased with a higher level of burnt severity and multiple fires increased the overall sediment build-up in the catchment, fostering an increase in background sediment yield. Simulated erosion patterns showed great spatial variability with large deposition and erosion rates inside streams. Due to this variability, it was difficult to identify land uses that were most sensitive for post-fire erosion, because some land-uses were located in more erosion-sensitive areas (e.g. streams, gullies) or were more affected by high burnt severity levels than others. Despite these limitations, LAPSUS performed well on addressing spatial sediment processes and has the ability to contribute to pre-fire management strategies. For instance, the percentage soil loss map (i.e. comparison of erosion and soil depth maps) could identify locations at risk.</p>

scholarly journals Analysis of the risk associated to coastal flooding hazards: A new historical extreme storm surges dataset for Dunkirk, France

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Hamdi ◽  
Emmanuel Garnier ◽  
Nathalie Giloy ◽  
Claire-Marie Duluc ◽  
Vincent Rebour
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Storm Surges ◽  
Coastal Hazards ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Frequency Model ◽  
River Flooding ◽  
Flooding Hazards ◽  
Flooding Events

Abstract. This paper aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a historical study devoted to French Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) which can be prone to the extreme marine flooding events. It has been shown in the literature that the use of HI can significantly improve the probabilistic and statistical modeling of extreme events. There is a significant lack of historical data about marine flooding (storms and storm surges) compared to river flooding events. To address this data scarcity and to improve the estimation of the risk associated to the marine flooding hazards, a dataset of historical storms and storm surges that hit the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during the five past centuries were recovered from archival sources, examined and used in a frequency analysis (FA) in order to assess its impact on the frequency estimations. This work on the Dunkirk site (representative of the Gravelines NPP) is a continuation of previous work performed on the La Rochelle site in France. Indeed, the frequency model (FM) used in the present paper had some success in the field of coastal hazards and it has been applied in previous studies to surge datasets to prevent marine flooding in the La Rochelle region in France. In a first step, only information collected from the literature (published reports, journal papers and PhD theses) is considered. A 1954 Coastal Engineering journal issue (Le Gorgeu and Guitonneau, 1954) on the reconstruction of the eastern dyke in Dunkirk has been more than a reference for this paper. It has indeed served as a main source of historical information (HI) in this study. Although this first historical dataset has extended the gauged record back in time to 1897, serious questions related to the exhaustiveness of the information and about the validity of the developed FM have remained unanswered. Additional qualitative and quantitative HI were extracted in a second step from many older archival sources. This work has led to the construction of storms and marine flooding sheets summarizing key data on each identified event. The quality control and the cross-validation of the collected information, which have been carried out systematically, indicate that it is valid and complete as regards extreme storms and storm surges. Most of the HI gathered displays a good agreement with other archival sources and documentary climate reconstructions. The probabilistic and statistical analysis of a dataset containing an exceptional observation considered as an outlier (i.e. the 1953 storm surge) has been significantly improved when the additional HI gathered in both literature and archives are used. As the historical data tend to be extreme, the right tail of the distribution has been reinforced and the 1953 exceptional event don't appear as an outlier any more. This new dataset provides a valuable source of information on storm surges for future characterization of coastal hazards.

scholarly journals Understanding epistemic uncertainty in large-scale coastal flood risk assessment for present and future climates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michalis I. Vousdoukas ◽  
Dimitrios Bouziotas ◽  
Alessio Giardino ◽  
Laurens M. Bouwer ◽  
Evangelos Voukouvalas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Epistemic Uncertainty ◽  
Coastal Protection ◽  
Flood Risk Assessment ◽  
Coastal Flood ◽  
Coastal Flood Risk ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. An upscaling of flood risk assessment frameworks beyond regional and national scales has taken place during recent years, with a number of large-scale models emerging as tools for hotspot identification, support for international policy-making and harmonization of climate change adaptation strategies. There is, however, limited insight on the scaling effects and structural limitations of flood risk models and, therefore, the underlying uncertainty. In light of this, we examine key sources of epistemic uncertainty in the Coastal Flood Risk (CFR) modelling chain: (i) the inclusion and interaction of different hydraulic components leading to extreme sea-level (ESL); (ii) inundation modelling; (iii) the underlying uncertainty in the Digital Elevation Model (DEM); (iv) flood defence information; (v) the assumptions behind the use of depth-damage functions that express vulnerability; and (vi) different climate change projections. The impact of these uncertainties to estimated Expected Annual Damage (EAD) for present and future climates is evaluated in a dual case study in Faro, Portugal and in the Iberian Peninsula. The ranking of the uncertainty factors varies among the different case studies, baseline CFR estimates, as well as their absolute/relative changes. We find that uncertainty from ESL contributions, and in particular the way waves are treated, can be higher than the uncertainty of the two greenhouse gas emission projections and six climate models that are used. Of comparable importance is the quality of information on coastal protection levels and DEM information. In the absence of large-extent datasets with sufficient resolution and accuracy the latter two factors are the main bottlenecks in terms of large-scale CFR assessment quality.

scholarly journals GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING SAND NOURISHMENT ON LOW TO VERY EXPOSED COASTS

2020 ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Henrik Vinge Karlsson ◽  
Britt Gadesboll Larsen ◽  
Per Sorensen
Keyword(s):  
Natural Variation ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Coastal Protection ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Protection Scheme ◽  
Coastal Cliff ◽  
Sand Nourishment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Privately Owned ◽  
Insight Into

Danish law establishes a common right of passage on foot along the Danish shoreline, even though beaches are often privately owned. The law also states that coastal protection must not hinder this. Therefore, sand nourishment should be part of every coastal protection scheme against erosion. Sand nourishments can be designed in numerous ways depending on their objectives. As part of the European Interreg project, Building With Nature (BWN), guidelines will be developed by the Danish Coastal Authority (DCA) in end-2020. This abstract presents these guidelines with special focus on the coasts of Denmark. Special emphasis will be on insight into the natural variation of the coasts, as this is vital both when designing effective coastal protection schemes and when evaluating the impact of the nourishment. In this project, the pathway along which sediment is being transported spans from offshore at the outer bar to the coastal cliff. The aim is to be able to determine the along- and cross-shore paths, along which the nourishment sand is transported, the diffusion velocity of the nourishment and the impact on the surrounding coasts. Based on the results of the multiple analysis, the primary objective is to produce guidelines on how to use sand nourishment to counteract erosion in a sustainable and socioeconomic way.Recorded Presentation from the vICCE (YouTube Link): https://youtu.be/nIrFFmH98V8

scholarly journals The role of unpaved roads in the formation of landslide processes (on the example of Voronezh region)

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-74
Author(s):  
Andrey N. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
Soil Layer ◽  
Anthropogenic Activity ◽  
Unpaved Roads ◽  
Erosion Processes ◽  
Voronezh Region ◽  
Landslide Processes ◽  
Landslide Process ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Landslide Distribution

The article gives a brief description of the Voronezh region, provides data on the cause of landslides in its territory. The cyclical nature of landslide processes is noted, which in the region is on average 6-8 years. Attention is focused on anthropogenic activity, leading to the occurrence of creeping layers of the earth. The main causes of erosion processes are: significant plowing of the area (80%), which is not subject to the rules of anti-erosion agrotechnology; the irrational use of pastures and hayfields; an extensive gully-beam network. The role of temporary reservoirs formed in the ruts of unpaved roads, passing along the slopes and ravines, as a source of overmoistening of the soil layers and initiation of landslide processes is considered. The analysis of the landslide distribution over the territory of the Voronezh region and their dependence on the network of dirt roads is given. The areas of the Voronezh region were ranked by the number of landslide processes associated with the impact of a number of unpaved highways. Of the 32 districts of the region, according to this ranking, 12 are extremely dangerous, very dangerous and dangerous, and the same areas have a very extensive network of unpaved roads running near ravines, steep banks of rivers and ponds, where potentially flow of landslide processes. Dirt roads often have relatively deep ruts where melted or rainwater accumulates, forming local micro-ponds. Flowing to the waterproof layer, water saturates the soil layer, which can slide down the slope, forming a landslide process. It is necessary to predict the possibility of the occurrence of dangerous natural phenomena when laying automobile dirt roads.

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