Assessing climate change impacts on open sandy coasts: A review

Abstract

The world's coastlines are shaped by mean sea level, wave conditions, storm surge, and riverflows. Climate change (CC) driven variations in these environmental forcings will inevitably have a profound effect on the coastal zone. Given the continued growth of coastal communities and extremely high value of coastal assets worldwide, effective adaptation measures underpinned by reliable coastal CC impact assessments are essential to avoid massive future coastal zone losses. This review aims to promote the adoption of best practice in local scale assessments of potential physical impacts of CC on open sandy coasts by (a) summarising the potential first order physical impacts of CC, (b) suggesting a standard modelling framework for local scale CC impact assessments, (c) identifying future research needs to facilitate the effective implementation of the prescribed modelling framework, (d) suggesting ways to address the identified research needs, and (e) discussing how existing methods/tools may be used for CC impact assessments until more advanced methods/tools are developed.