Abstract
Climate change may exacerbate the environmental damage due to coastal hazards and increase associated risks. This would result in degradation of coastal wetlands, especially in developing countries due to the lack of sufficient resilience to coastal hazards such as inundation and coastal erosion. Environmental damages will lead to a decrease in services provided by the coastal wetland ecosystems that contribute to human wellbeing. To provide better insights on the little known issue of quantifying potential climate change-driven environmental risk, this article presents a stepwise approach to quantify coastline recession-driven risk associated with the tourism service provided by the Trincomalee beaches, dunes and pelagic system (Indian Ocean) along the East coast of Sri Lanka in 2110. To achieve this, here we first estimate the loss value of the tourism service due to sea level rise (SLR) and storm induced erosion in 2110, by using economic valuation techniques followed by a scenario-based approach. This is followed by the quantification of the environmental risk value by combining the result of the aforementioned loss value with the exceedance probability of coastal erosion derived from a prior study. Results show a medium environmental risk value ranging from 0 to 11,000 US$/Ha of beach area due to complete beach loss by 2110. This indicates that SLR and storm induced erosion in 2110 is not likely to pose a very high environmental risk associated with the tourism service of ecosystems in Trincomalee coasts. The approach presented in this study can be directly applied in other coastal areas of interest to gain a better understanding of the likely costs of climate change driven environmental risk, which is an emerging topic in coastal zone management.
Highlights
In recent decades, risk assessment has become a priority for authorities and stakeholders in countries with low lying areas prone to the coastal hazards
Present-day value of tourism service To quantify the monetary value of the tourism service provided by the Trincomalee beaches, dunes and pelagic system (Indian Ocean), the contingent valuation and net factor income methods are used1
The results of this study are presented in three parts; (1) present-day value of the tourism service provided by the wetland ecosystems of Trincomalee district; (2) potential loss value of the tourism service due to coastline recession in 2110; and (3) environmental risk value associated with the tourism service of the wetland ecosystems due to coastline recession in 2110
Summary
Risk assessment has become a priority for authorities and stakeholders in countries with low lying areas prone to the coastal hazards. There is a little known yet regarding the quantification of environmental risk due to the climate change impacts on coastal wetland ecosystems. This gap is mainly due to two reasons: (1) quantification of the losses in the value of wetland ecosystems services due to climate change-driven coastal hazards is complex, and is very scarce in the literature (Mehvar et al, 2018a); and (2) the uncertainty inherent in deterministic projections of climate change-driven hazards arising from the uncertainty associated with climate change (e.g probability of the occurrence of sea level rise over time)
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