Integrating estuarine, coastal and inner shelf sediment systems in a common conceptual framework as a basis for participatory shoreline management

Abstract

Coastal and estuarine margins are home to an increasing proportion of the global human population and its activities. Within this context, landforms play a critical role in mediating the translation of erosion and flood risk to human receptors in environmental settings that are vulnerable to the likely impacts of climate change. Predicting how coastal and estuarine landforms will evolve in response to changes in sea level and wave climate is thus of considerable importance. This is naturally a modelling problem but previous efforts have often failed to translate generic principles into models that do justice to the place-specific interactions between contemporary processes, antecedent geology, sea level history, historical morphology, engineering interventions and, not least, broader societal concerns. Progress clearly requires better models but, as we argue here, more sophisticated conceptual frameworks are also needed. Accordingly, we outline a new Coastal and Estuarine System Mapping (CESM) approach that captures the configuration of estuarine, coastal and inner shelf landform complexes within a unifying framework that also explicitly resolves the multitude of human interventions that influence shoreline change. An illustrative application to the Suffolk coast of eastern England demonstrates the potential of CESM to encourage a more participatory approach to regional shoreline management and the application of scientific understanding to the challenge of living with human and climate change impacts at the coast

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ORCID for R.J. Nicholls: orcid.org/0000-0002-9715-1109

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