Abstract
There are no sequential and integrated approaches that include the steps needed to perform an adequate management and planning of the coastal zones to mitigate coastal erosion problems and climate change effects. Important numerical model packs are available for users, but often looking deeply to the physical processes, demanding big computational efforts and focusing on specific problems. Thus, it is important to provide adequate tools to the decision-makers, which can be easily interpreted by populations, promoting discussions of optimal intervention scenarios in medium to long-term horizons. COMASO (coastal management software) intends to fill this gap, presenting a group of tools that can be applied in standalone mode, or in a sequential order. The first tool should map the coastal erosion vulnerability and risk, also including the climate change effects, defining a hierarchy of priorities where coastal defense interventions should be performed, or limiting/constraining some land uses or activities. In the locations identified as priorities, a more detailed analysis should consider the application of shoreline and cross-shore evolution models (second tool), allowing discussing intervention scenarios, in medium to long-term horizons. After the defined scenarios, the design of the intervention should be discussed, both in case of being a hard coastal structure or an artificial nourishment (third type of tools). Finally, a cost-benefit assessment tool should optimize the decisions, forecasting costs and benefits for each different scenario, through definition of economic values to the interventions and to the land/services/ecosystems, weighting all the environmental, cultural, social and historical aspects. It is considered that COMASO tools can help giving answers to the major problems of the coastal planning and management entities, integrating transversal knowledge in risk assessment, physical processes, engineering and economic evaluations. The integrated coastal zone management needs these tools to ensure sustainable coastal zones, mitigating erosion and climate change effects.
Highlights
Coastal erosion is an important problem around the world and requires frequent discussion on mitigation measures and coastal zones management policies [1,2]
The earliest type of long-term coastal evolution models focused on predicting the shoreline evolution in response to the potential sediment transport gradient generated by incident wave energy, following the one-line theory
The goal of this methodology is to support decision-making for planning and coastal management with sustainable coastal interventions, by encompassing the assessment of the shoreline evolution impacts, and the design of artificial nourishment or coastal structures, allowing the final costs and benefits analysis
Summary
Coastal erosion is an important problem around the world and requires frequent discussion on mitigation measures and coastal zones management policies [1,2]. North Carolina State University (USA) considers that computational modeling is a crucial tool in the effort to understand coastal processes They develop models to describe the oceans in deep water and the nearshore, and validate them against the best available measurements and knowledge of natural behavior. Many other institutions may be referred and it is clear that process-based numerical models have been and still are widely used to describe the complex interaction between waves, tides and sediment transport, and the resulting morphological and shoreline changes These models are successfully applied for short-term (hours to days) and medium-term (weeks to months) forecasting, such as single or multiple storm events, often at a limited spatial scale associated with specific engineering schemes [15].
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