Changing Minds: Towards Water-Based Architecture and Public Space for the Future Urban Archipelago

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened...

A Systematic Approach to Improve Reliability of Storm Surge Barrier Closures

Coastal defenses must be upgraded to combat increasing flood risk due to climate change and other factors. Storm surge barriers, large movable hydraulic structures that close temporarily during storm surges to prevent coastal floods, play a vital role in protecting estuaries. Due to the complexity of their risk analyses, important improvements...

Design & assessing the flood risk management paradigm shift: an interdisciplinary study of Vlissingen, the Netherlands

Mean sea level rise (SLR) could increase up to 2m by 2100, which would see damage caused by coastal flooding in Europe increase from €1.25bn per annum currently to €961bn in just over 80 years. Urban areas situated along the North Sea coastline are particularly vulnerable to extreme sea level rise (a combination of SLR, tide and storm surges)....

Wave overtopping at near-vertical seawalls: Influence of foreshore evolution during storms

This work presents the results of an investigation on how wave overtopping at a near-vertical seawall at the back of a sandy foreshore is influenced by sequences of erosive storms. The experiments were carried out in the Large Wave Flume (GWK) at Leibniz University, Hannover (Germany). The tested layout consisted of a near-vertical 10/1...

The Influence of Infragravity Waves on Overtopping at Coastal Structures with Shallow Foreshores

Coastal communities across the globe are often protected by structures, such as seawalls, levees or dikes, which allow only a safe volume of water to pass over or “overtop” them due to wave action during storms. The area seaward of these structures is often characterised by shallow, gently sloping beds referred to as foreshores.<br/>As storm...

An integrated framework of coastal flood modelling under the failures of sea dikes: a case study in Shanghai

Climate change leads to sea level rise worldwide, as well as increases in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones (TCs). Storm surge induced by TC’s, together with spring tides, threatens to cause failure of flood defenses, resulting in massive flooding in low-lying coastal areas. However, limited research has been done on the...

Integrated coastal flood design strategies: changing paradigm in flood risk management

The relation between the design of the flood protection infrastructure and the design of the urbanscape is the focus of this paper with the question on how these two types of design can consciously affect each other. The text presents the preliminary result of an interdisciplinary research conducted by a team of urban designers and hydraulic...

A probabilistic approach to estimating residential losses from different flood types

Residential assets, comprising buildings and household contents, are a major source of direct flood losses. Existing damage models are mostly deterministic and limited to particular countries or flood types. Here, we compile building-level losses from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands covering a wide range of fluvial and pluvial flood events...

Hard or soft flood adaptation? Advantages of a hybrid strategy for Shanghai

Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies used to reduce risk. The results show that the potential flood...

A High-Resolution Global Dataset of Extreme Sea Levels, Tides, and Storm Surges, Including Future Projections

The world’s coastal areas are increasingly at risk of coastal flooding due to sea-level rise (SLR). We present a novel global dataset of extreme sea levels, the Coastal Dataset for the Evaluation of Climate Impact (CoDEC), which can be used to accurately map the impact of climate change on coastal regions around the world. The third...

Impact of Coral Reef Mining Pits on Nearshore Hydrodynamics and Wave Runup During Extreme Wave Events

Small island developing states are among the most vulnerable areas to the impact of natural hazards and climate change. Flooding due to storm surges and extreme waves, coastal erosion, and salinization of freshwater lenses are already a serious threat and could lead to irreversible consequences in the coming decades. Reef flat mining is one...

Contribution of infragravity waves to run-up and overwash in the pertuis breton embayment (France)

Wave run-up and dune overwash are typically assessed using empirical models developed for a specific range of often-simplistic conditions. Field experiments are essential in extending these formulae; yet obtaining comprehensive field data under extreme conditions is often challenging. Here, we use XBeach Surfbeat (XB-SB)-a shortwave-averaged...

Coastal Impacts Driven by Sea-Level Rise in Cartagena de Indias

This work analyzes the coastal impacts of the combined effect of extreme waves and sea level extremes, including surges and projected mean sea level rise in Bocagrande, Cartagena (Colombia). Extreme waves are assessed from a wave reanalysis that are propagated from deep waters to the beach considering the hydrodynamic processes and taking into...

Nonhydrostatic and surfbeat model predictions of extreme wave run-up in fringing reef environments

The accurate prediction of extreme wave run-up is important for effective coastal engineering design and coastal hazard management. While run-up processes on open sandy coasts have been reasonably well-studied, very few studies have focused on understanding and predicting wave run-up at coral reef-fronted coastlines. This paper applies the short...

Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries

When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of ‘compound events’. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coastal and river flooding on a global scale. Therefore, in this letter,...

Climate change adaptation guidelines for coastal protection and management in India

A general overview publication how to prepare the Indian coastline for climate change. The key document is Volume 1: “Climate Change Adaptation Guidelines for Coastal Protection and Management in India”. The Guidelines document (Volume I) is self-contained, with adequate information to understand the Guidelines and put them into practice. It is...

New estimates of potential impacts of sea level rise and coastal floods in Poland

Polish coastal zone is thought to be one of the most exposed to sea level rise in Europe. With mean sea levels expected to increase between 28 and 98 cm by the end of the century, and storms increasing in severity, accurate estimates of the consequences of those phenomena are needed. Recent advances in quality and availability of spatial data in...

A comparison of two global datasets of extreme sea levels and resulting flood exposure

Estimating the current risk of coastal flooding requires adequate information on extreme sea levels. For over a decade, the only global data available was the DINAS-COAST Extreme Sea Levels (DCESL) dataset, which applies a static approximation to estimate extreme sea levels. Recently, a dynamically derived dataset was developed: the Global...