Mangroves and coastal topography create economic “safe havens” from tropical storms

Evidence suggests that mangroves protect economic activity in coastal areas. We estimate this protection from mangroves and coastal elevation globally, examining both “direct” and “indirect” exposure events (< 100 km vs. ≥ 100 km distance from a cyclone’s “eye”, respectively). We find that higher elevation (≥ 50 m) or wide mangroves (≥ 10 m seaward width) alone shelter economic activity from indirect cyclone exposure, whereas protection from direct cyclone exposure occurs only in high elevation communities with wide mangroves. Our results reveal that the majority of these “safe havens” are in upper middle-income countries but provide significant benefits to populations in lower middle-income countries.

Las fortificaciones de la línea de costa de Málaga en época nazarí, algo más que un sugerente quinteto defensivo

The fortifications of the coast of Malaga in the Nasrid period, more than a suggestive defensive quintetIn this article we deal with the unique coastal defensive belt that the city of Malaga has in Nasrid times, about the origin of it and its process of building as well as its functionalities that exceed the purely defensive ones. The first constructions aimed at defending the city from the sea correspond to the dynasty, with the construction of the alcazaba and the defensive fence of the medina, as well as incipient atarazanas, a cast of works of political propaganda. The Almoravid and Almohad empires do not stand out for the execution of new plant works, but rather for maintenance, adequacy and repair work. Its peak will be reached during the Nasrid sultanate, with the buildings of the castle of Gibralfaro, a terrestrial coracha, the castil of the Genoese and the atarazanas, all of them distributed and adapted with great skill to the coastal topography, as well as also by suggestive refortification works. All this reflects the various political and economic situations that aretransformed throughout the Islamic period during the caliphate, as the caliphate and the Nazarí headquarters, of which Malaga is the second city in importance and its main port. Our methodology has taken into account the contributions of textual sources, historiographic sources and, above all, archaeological actions.

Assessing transportation vulnerability to tsunamis: utilising post-event field data from the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami, Japan, and the 2015 Illapel tsunami, Chile

Transportation infrastructure is crucial to the operation of society, particularly during post-event response and recovery. Transportation assets, such as roads and bridges, can be exposed to tsunami impacts when near the coast. Using fragility functions in an impact assessment identifies potential tsunami effects to inform decisions on potential mitigation strategies. Such functions have not been available for transportation assets exposed to tsunami hazard in the past due to limited empirical datasets. This study provides a suite of observations on the influence of tsunami inundation depth, road-use type, culverts, inundation distance, debris and coastal topography. Fragility functions are developed for roads, considering inundation depth, road-use type, and coastal topography and, for bridges, considering only inundation depth above deck base height. Fragility functions are developed for roads and bridges through combined survey and remotely sensed data for the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Japan, and using post-event field survey data from the 2015 Illapel earthquake and tsunami, Chile. The fragility functions show a trend of lower tsunami vulnerability (through lower probabilities of reaching or exceeding a given damage level) for road-use categories of potentially higher construction standards. The topographic setting is also shown to affect the vulnerability of transportation assets in a tsunami, with coastal plains seeing higher initial vulnerability in some instances (e.g. for state roads with up to 5 m inundation depth) but with coastal valleys (in some locations exceeding 30 m inundation depth) seeing higher asset vulnerability overall. This study represents the first peer-reviewed example of empirical road and bridge fragility functions that consider a range of damage levels. This suite of synthesised functions is applicable to a variety of exposure and attribute types for use in global tsunami impact assessments to inform resilience and mitigation strategies.