Djerba Island, Tunisia, 1992–2019

Tunisia—would be willing to contribute over €5 million a year for a project to reduce coastal erosion (Dribek and Voltaire 2017). (For the effects of coastal erosion on a Djerba Island hotel, see photo 5.3.) This figure implies that beach preservation measures to reduce coastal erosion may be financed largely by contributions from tourists9 and also measures

PHOTO 5.3

Effects of Coastal Erosion on Hotel les Sirenes, Djerba Island, Tunisia, 1992–2019

Sources: Oueslati, Labidi, and Elamri 2015; Heger and Vashold 2021. 1992 and 2013 photos: © Ameur Oueslati / Agence de protection et d’aménagement du littoral (APAL). 2016 and 2019 photos: © 2020 CNES/Airbus, courtesy of Google Earth. Permission required for reuse.

the value that tourists attribute to intact beaches. Moreover, it implies a modest contribution of under US$3 per tourist per year. Djerba hosted about 25 percent of the 9 million tourists who visited Tunisia in 2019, or about 2 million tourists.

For a similar region in Morocco—the Tetouan coast with its main tourist beaches—total eroded surface in the period 1958–2018 amounted to approximately 490 hectares (Benkhattab et al. 2020). Drawing on these numbers and projections about future beach retreat, lost revenues to the economy due to the retreat of these beaches alone could total US$190 billion in the next few decades (Flayou et al. 2017).10

Other Analyses

Other approaches that quantify the economic effects of coastal erosion also highlight large potential losses to the local economy. They may use information on beach attributes such as their width, land value, and characteristics of nearby hotels (for example, room price) to directly estimate reductions of land values and revenues due to coastal erosion in the framework of hedonic price regressions.

Using such an approach, the decrease in beach width due to coastal erosion in Rethymnon on the Greek island of Crete could lead to revenue losses amounting to around €18.5 million in the next 10 years because of the progressing retreat of a single beach (Alexandrakis, Manasakis, and Kampanis 2015). The impact of SLR on beach tourism in Sahl Hasheesh and Makadi Bay on the Red Sea in Egypt is expected to lead to losses in revenues that could exceed US$350,000 per day in 2050 (Sharaan, Somphog, and Udo 2020). Similar studies show beach-surface reduction to have a decisive negative impact on the overall image of tourist destinations, decreasing the number of arrivals and hence reducing receipts from them (Bitan and Zviely 2019; Raybould et al. 2013; Scott, Simpson, and Sim 2012).

Therefore, direct losses due to coastal erosion are only a fraction of total losses to the economy, not considering the impact on tourism and other development activities (such as ports and so on) as well as ecosystems. Considering the evidence on indirect losses attributable to coastal erosion, the analysis of direct costs of coastal erosion presented in the previous section (“Costs from Destruction of Land Values and Built Assets”) provides only a conservative estimate of the total costs of this phenomenon to Middle East and North Africa economies.

Accounting for lost future revenues is crucial for assessing the real costs of coastal erosion. Furthermore, coastal erosion processes can lead to lost jobs and reduced tax revenues from ports and near-shore industries dependent on intact coasts. Another important point to consider is that coastal erosion may permanently damage ecosystems that can be