Abstract
Flooding affects Mediterranean coastal areas, with negative impacts on regional populations and ecosystems. This paper reviews the causes and consequences of coastal flooding in European Mediterranean countries, common and advanced solutions implemented to mitigate flood risk, and the importance of stakeholder involvement in developing these solutions. Climate change, intensive urbanization, tourism, deforestation, wildfires, and erosion are the main causes of coastal flooding, leading to social and economic losses, degradation of ecosystems, and water and soil contamination due to saltwater intrusion. Various measures for mitigating urban coastal flooding have been implemented, including coastal barriers, infrastructural drainage systems, wetlands, and mobile dams. Development and implementation of such solutions should be performed in close collaboration with stakeholders, but their current engagement at the coordination and/or decision-making level does not allow full integration of local knowledge in flood mitigation projects. Various processes are used to engage stakeholders in coastal flood mitigation, but participatory approaches are required to integrate their perspectives into performance analysis of potential solutions. Such approaches would allow a balance to be reached between nature conservation, market forces, stakeholder needs, and decision-makers’ priorities, resulting in development of innovative and sustainable mitigation solutions to enhance urban resilience to coastal flooding.
Highlights
Flooding is one of the main natural hazards jeopardizing lives and properties of the people, and causing relevant economic losses [1]
This paper provides an overview of current flood problems along the European
There are different types/examples of flood mitigation solutions in Southern Europe and for this reason we select one from each country which is considered a successful practice from the technical point of view, based on the available literature e.g., [63,64,65]
Summary
Flooding is one of the main natural hazards jeopardizing lives and properties of the people, and causing relevant economic losses [1]. Various strategies to mitigate coastal flooding have been implemented in recent decades, the increasing challenges posed by climate change, coupled with rapid socioeconomic development, call for innovative approaches that make use of local knowledge and involve stakeholders [27] Mediterranean coast and their causes and main impacts, and presents four common and/or promising solutions implemented to date to mitigate coastal flooding. This paper reviews and summarizes the scientific literature on causes, consequences and potential solutions to mitigate coastal flooding This is needed to provide an overall vision of the problem, and support policy and decision making to face increasing coastal flood hazard arising e.g., from climate change.
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