African Countries

Alexandria, forcing about 545,000 people to abandon their homes and land and leading to the loss of 70,500 jobs. Other vulnerable cities include Muscat in Oman; Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; Aden, Republic of Yemen; and Basra, Iraq (El-Raey 2009).

Costs from Destruction of Land Values and Built Assets

Coastal erosion poses a particular threat to Middle East and North Africa economies because of their high economic exposure to sectors that derive their income from coast-related services, like beach tourism. Many of the region’s largest urban centers as well as many smaller towns and villages are on the shore, which concentrates economic activity in these areas.

In this section, the results of a coastal-erosion monetization exercise show that coastal erosion presents a challenge, particularly to the four selected countries: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. These contemporary developments emphasize the need for timely collective action on this issue to mitigate future impacts.

Quantifying the Extent and Rates of Coastal Degradation

In this exercise, the average erosion rates along a country’s eroding coasts are extracted from the global dataset (mentioned earlier) on historical shoreline changes from 1984 to 2016 (Luijendijk et al. 2018). Following previous monetization studies, this analysis focuses on gross coastal erosion, not net coastal erosion (gross erosion plus accretion) (see, for example, Croitoru, Miranda, and Sarraf 2019).

This focus on gross coastal erosion also leads to erosion values that differ from those reported in table 5.1 and depicted in figure 5.2. In other words, this analysis does not include the value of the accretion of areas. This is largely because coastal erosion’s economic effects are always

TABLE 5.1

Extent and Rates of Coastal Erosion in Selected North African Countries

Country Algeria Libya Morocco Tunisia

Share of coastline subject to erosion (%) 29 55 54 59 Share of coastline urbanized (%) 14.5 7.0 6.6 15.0

Long-term erosion Rate(m/yr) Area(ha/yr) −2.1 −90.5 −0.9 −100.1 −0.9 −139.9 −2.4 −247.3

Source: Heger and Vashold 2021, based on Luijendijk et al. 2018. Note: The shares of urbanized coastline are from 2017 data. All other values are annual averages from a dataset on historical shoreline changes from 1984 to 2016, based on Luijendijk et al. (2018). ha/yr = hectares per year; m/yr = meters per year.