Abstract
Climate change threatens coastal areas, posing significant risks to natural and human systems, including coastal erosion and inundation. This paper presents a multi-risk approach integrating multiple climate-related hazards and exposure and vulnerability factors across different spatial units and temporal scales. The multi-hazard assessment employs an influence matrix to analyze the relationships among hazards (sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and storm surge) and their disjoint probability. The multi-vulnerability considers the susceptibility of the exposed receptors (wetlands, beaches, and urban areas) to different hazards based on multiple indicators (dunes, shoreline evolution, and urbanization rate). The methodology was applied in the North Adriatic coast, producing a ranking of multi-hazard risks by means of GIS maps and statistics. The results highlight that the higher multi-hazard score (meaning presence of all investigated hazards) is near the coastline while multi-vulnerability is relatively high in the whole case study, especially for beaches, wetlands, protected areas, and river mouths. The overall multi-risk score presents a trend similar to multi-hazard and shows that beaches is the receptor most affected by multiple risks (60% of surface in the higher multi-risk classes). Risk statistics were developed for coastal municipalities and local stakeholders to support the setting of adaptation priorities and coastal zone management plans.
Highlights
Nowadays, international and European policies for disaster risk reduction, sustainable development, and climate adaptation are posing increasing emphasis on systemic risks [1]
Going beyond the traditional risk-by-risk approach commonly used to evaluate the effect of individual hazards in coastal areas (e.g., [30,31,32,33,34,35,36]), this paper presents a pioneering Multi-Risk Assessment (MRA) methodology to measure the effect of climate change on multiple hazards on exposed vulnerable sectors
Decision makers and local authorities need to have a clear vision of systemic risks affecting human health and safety, the environment, the economy, and society at large to develop robust adaptation pathways [103,104]
Summary
International and European policies for disaster risk reduction, sustainable development, and climate adaptation are posing increasing emphasis on systemic risks [1]. The need of holistic risk management was first mentioned in the Hyogo Framework for Action [2] and confirmed in the UN’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction [3]. Multi-hazard risk management was recognized by the Post-2015 Development Agenda as an important way to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) [4]. The multi-risk paradigm is gaining importance within the climate adaptation policies (e.g., the European Adaptation Strategy [7]) and the ambitious goals set by the European Green Deal Green Deal [8]
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