CHAPTER 5
Blue Seas: Fighting Coastal Erosion
OVERVIEW Beaches are retreating and coastal areas are eroding fast in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Especially in the Maghreb subregion, they are already in an advanced stage of degradation, having eroded at alarming rates in recent decades. With uncontrolled human development and the intensification of climate change impacts, pressures are likely to increase. Managing coasts sustainably is a critical part of the green, resilient, and inclusive development (GRID) paradigm for the region’s economies to adopt, because most of their people live in coastal areas— and many, especially in the poorer strata of society, depend on intact coasts for their livelihoods. Coastal erosion in the region already entails substantial costs, as this chapter shows in an economic quantification exercise for four Maghreb countries.1 Those estimated direct costs are conservative since they incorporate costs only for lost land and destroyed buildings and do not take into account the forgone revenues from tourism or fishing activities or damages to marine infrastructure and ecosystems that are important for the region’s biodiversity. These indirect costs are most likely significant, especially for economies heavily dependent on tourism, because tourists are less willing to return when beaches are gradually disappearing. Nonetheless, the estimated annual costs due to losses in land and destroyed buildings alone already amount to large sums, in both absolute terms and as shares of annual economic output. The reasons for eroding beaches are manifold, but knowledge is often sparse about specific drivers of coastal erosion in the region’s hot spots.
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