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Climate-resilient coasts require diverse defence solutions

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 485–487 (2020)Cite this article

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Traditional coastal protection methods that rely on built, hard structures like seawalls may not be effective to keep pace with a changing climate. Nature-based coastal defences based on habitat restoration can be an adaptive coastal protection alternative.

Humans have been constructing coastal defences for 7,000 years1. However, with climate change and continued coastal population growth, traditional defences can no longer keep pace. This is accelerating the need for a broader range of coastal protection interventions. Regardless of whether the Paris Agreement is achieved, most locations globally will experience sea level rise and an amplification in the magnitude and/or frequency of extreme storm events2. Traditional coastal protection methods used to protect communities and coastal assets from erosion and flooding are hard structures, such as seawalls, breakwaters, groynes and dikes. A significant annual investment and maintenance cost of US$12–71 billion for protecting the globe with dikes alone is required if we continue to defend the coast in this way3. Part of this maintenance cost is because hard structures are non-adaptive — they have to be upgraded, repaired and rebuilt in response to a changing climate. Hard structures are expensive to build and have environmental and social costs as coastal habitats (for example, dunes and beaches, mangroves and saltmarshes) are replaced with artificial ones, severing the transition zone between terrestrial and marine systems4 and human access to natural shorelines. A continued reliance on traditional defences in a future of growing societal demand for shoreline protection is economically, environmentally and socially unsustainable.

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Fig. 1: Nature-based coastal defences.

reproduced from ref. 20, Mike Hilton (a); ref. 21, Taylor & Francis (b); ref. 20, Taylor & Francis (d)

Fig. 2: A decision support framework for integrating nature-based coastal defence.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. James for his valuable comments on drafts of this manuscript. We also thank D. Provis for his advice on uptake and use in the engineering profession. The National Centre for Coasts and Climate is funded through the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub by the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program.

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  1. National Centre for Coasts and Climate, School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Rebecca L. Morris & Stephen E. Swearer

  2. School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Anthony Boxshall

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  1. Rebecca L. Morris
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Correspondence to Rebecca L. Morris.

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Morris, R.L., Boxshall, A. & Swearer, S.E. Climate-resilient coasts require diverse defence solutions. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 485–487 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0798-9

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