Overview

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.

This chapter discusses the general drivers of coastal erosion; however, comprehensive and granular assessments of the Middle East and North Africa’s coasts are limited, which undermines the effective control of erosive processes. The next section presents findings from two novel such analyses of the coasts of Morocco and Tunisia, conducted for this report in cooperation with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) of the United Kingdom. However, even here, detailed studies on the balance between sediment added to and removed from the coastal system and its transport, prevalent wave dynamics, and the possible effects of control measures would be necessary to effectively combat the disappearance of the region’s beaches.

While most measures for combating coastal erosion require knowledge about local characteristics, starting a comprehensive integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) scheme is a crucial step to ensure sustainable development of the region’s coasts in the future by avoiding coastal erosion where possible and mitigating erosion where it is not. Such an initiation includes identifying and involving all relevant stakeholders; increasing capacity for data, monitoring, and analysis; and planning prospective and reactive measures. The inclusion of all parties interested in sustainable coastal development—not only the local population and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) but also public authorities and private sector players—is crucial and also underlines the importance of managing coasts for development within a GRID framework.

A key part of ICZM is segmenting the coast into different zones for which different development policy strategies ought to be formulated, making the inclusion of different interests possible. Another priority recommendation is the increased use of nature-based solutions (NBS) like mangroves or marshes to protect existing human structures. NBS solutions, as opposed to other possibilities, have the advantage of conserving or restoring biodiversity and habitats for flora and fauna while also offering job opportunities for the local population, irrespective of gender, with knowledge of the local characteristics, in line with a GRID framework.

The chapter concludes with a summary of various other potential ways to combat coastal erosion under the tenets of an ICZM scheme. International and regional examples illustrate the different possibilities for defending the coast and its assets. In addition to NBS, these include “hard-defense” structures such as groins or seawalls and “soft-defense” measures such as beach nourishment—adding sand to eroding shorelines. Finally, it discusses some regulations regarding dam construction and sand mining.

Targeted policies that include suitable defense strategies and regulations in a comprehensive scheme for managing the Middle East and