AXA Chair on Climate Change impacts and Coastal Risk

Research line 3: Innovations in coastal risk assessment

 
Foregoing land-use opportunities in coastal regions and protecting coasts is costly, but so is damage caused by inundation and erosion. Developing appropriate policies and strategies for land-use planning purposes is therefore a balancing act. While risk based management/planning has been common practice in spheres such as flood protection, inexplicably, this way of thinking has only recently emerged in coastal zone management/planning. Historically, far reaching coastal management/planning decisions have been made based only a single extreme hazard estimate with little or no consideration given to the uncertainty in the hazard nor the potential consequences (damage) caused by the hazard. More often than not, this has led to very conservative management/planning decisions which, ultimately, have resulted in forgoing lucrative land-use opportunities.
 
This Research line will be devoted to developing innovative and easy-to-use coastal risk assessment methods by combining probabilistic coastal hazard estimates obtained via the outcomes of Research Line #2 with state-of-the-art consequence (damage) modelling techniques.