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Reply to: Sandy beaches can survive sea-level rise

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 996–997 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 27 October 2020

replying to J. A. G. Cooper et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00934-2 (2020)

In our global analysis of sandy shoreline dynamics during the twenty-first century1 we show that many sandy coastlines worldwide are under threat of erosion due to sea-level rise (SLR) and ambient shoreline changes. We base our findings on a probabilistic global modelling effort that improves the state of the art on global sandy beach erosion modelling and integrates new global datasets. Cooper et al.2 contest our findings and claim that “provided that accommodation space is available, beaches migrate landwards as sea level rises and shorelines recede”; a point also made in our paper. In our analysis, we do not address the challenging topic of morphological evolution of retreating sandy coastlines, which Cooper et al. discuss. Most of their discussion focuses on beach width maintenance, whereas the focus of our work is shoreline retreat under SLR. There is a subtle, but important, difference between the two. In the absence of a global dataset on sandy beach width and accommodation space, we produced estimates of shoreline change assuming that there are no physical limits on potential shoreline retreat. In the final section of our paper, we then discuss results in a regional/global perspective, with a clearly stated assumption that “we consider beaches that are projected to experience a shoreline retreat >100 m as seriously threatened by coastal erosion”. The aim of such a discussion was to give a socio-economic dimension to our findings, given that many popular sandy beaches worldwide have even less than 100 m of available accommodation space at their backshore. Some of these thoughts are common with other recent studies3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, Ispra, Italy

    Michalis I. Vousdoukas, Lorenzo Mentaschi & Luc Feyen

  2. Department of Water Science and Engineering, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, the Netherlands

    Roshanka Ranasinghe

  3. Water Engineering and Management, Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

    Roshanka Ranasinghe & Panagiotis Athanasiou

  4. Harbour, Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Deltares, Delft, the Netherlands

    Roshanka Ranasinghe, Panagiotis Athanasiou & Arjen Luijendijk

  5. Department of Applied Physics, University of Cadiz, Puerto Real, Spain

    Theocharis A. Plomaritis

  6. CIMA, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

    Theocharis A. Plomaritis

  7. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

    Arjen Luijendijk

Authors
  1. Michalis I. Vousdoukas
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  2. Roshanka Ranasinghe
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  3. Lorenzo Mentaschi
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  4. Theocharis A. Plomaritis
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  5. Panagiotis Athanasiou
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  6. Arjen Luijendijk
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  7. Luc Feyen
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Contributions

All authors conceived, wrote and commented on the manuscript at all stages.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michalis I. Vousdoukas.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Charles Fletcher and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Vousdoukas, M.I., Ranasinghe, R., Mentaschi, L. et al. Reply to: Sandy beaches can survive sea-level rise. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 996–997 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00935-1

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