Sustainable coastal zone management: A concept for forecasting long-term and large-scale coastal evolution

Abstract

Climate change exerts pressure on the coastal zone by altering sediment supply from the hinterland and rising sea levels. Human activity affects the dynamics of the coastal zone as well. Both natural and human-induced changes in variables that govern coastal dynamics have a profound effect on the long-term and large-scale evolution of the coastal zone. In this paper, we introduce a concept that addresses the components relevant in sustainable integrated coastal zone management. We illustrate that quantifying sediment budgets in the coastal zone might improve our understanding of long-term (>100 y) coastal evolution. The increasing attention within sustainable coastal management on sensitivity analyses of climate change impacts and socioeconomic activities in the coastal zone implies an increasing demand of probabilistic scenarios of coastal evolution spanning a time interval of ∼100 years. Within probabilistic scenarios of coastal evolution, the quantification of the coastal sediment budget cannot be discarded.