On the need for a new generation of coastal change models for the 21st century
Roshanka Ranasinghe
Abstract
The combination of climate change impacts, declining fluvial sediment supply, and heavy human utilization of the coastal zone, arguably the most populated and developed land zone in the world, will very likely lead to massive socio-economic and environmental losses in the coming decades. Effective coastal planning/management strategies that can help circumvent such losses require reliable local scale (<~10 km) projections of coastal change resulting from the integrated effect of climate change driven variations in mean sea level, storm surge, waves, and riverflows. Presently available numerical models are unable to adequately fulfill this need. A new generation of multi-scale, probabilistic coastal change models is urgently needed to comprehensively assess and optimise coastal risk at local scale, enabling risk informed, climate proof adaptation measures that strike a good balance between risk and reward.