Coastal theme
Assoc Prof Mark Dickson
Programme Co-Leader
The University of Auckland
Dr Rob Bell
Programme Co-Leader
NIWA
Background
To resolve physical coastal hazard questions faced by communities around Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Incremental sea-level rise and changing wave patterns will fundamentally re-shape our coastlines and re-define New Zealand’s future coastal hazard and risk. We will improve the knowledge of coastal risk to the combined effect of sea level rise, flooding, and erosion around New Zealand to underpin a national resilience coastal strategy.
Working closely with end-users, we will identify hotspots of coastal risk (current and future) and provide integrated scientific datasets to underpin robust decision-making. From this, we will develop a new suite of technical guidelines to assist management agencies to cope with coastal adaptation. Through timely assessment of New Zealand’s coastal erosion and flooding/inundation risk, along with evaluation of the most useful mitigation options, this theme will support better targeting of adaptation plans, reducing the costs of hazard exposure.
Three complementary research projects underlie the Coastal theme.
Projects
1
New Zealand’s Changing Coastline:
We aim to to develop a national framework for assessing New Zealand’s changing coastline that will deliver an understanding of slow onset coastal change and data to underpin modelling of ongoing impacts. A national-scale approach is proposed, comprising two sub-projects:
- Smart coastal change detection
- Understanding New Zealand’s coastal change and supporting projections of future shoreline change
2
Coastal Flooding:
Our overarching aim is to improve understanding of current and future coastal flooding hazard and risk, and its implications for decision making, in the complex environments that characterise New Zealand’s coast through three sub-projects:
- Estuarine flooding predictors
- Influence of human–climate interactions on coastal flood hazard and risk
- Compound risk from multiple coastal hazards
3
Coastal Adaptation:
The overarching aim of this project is to provide consistent, proactive and implementable knowledge to address the coastal adaptation challenge. New tools will be developed for national guidance, risk and vulnerability assessments, land-use planning and codes of practice for decision making in different coastal environments around New Zealand. They will be ‘fit for purpose’, aligned to the changing risk regimes for implementation at different levels of governance, and have resilience outcomes (e.g. community cohesion, health and safety, and infrastructure needs) that achieve more effective and sustainable decision making. This project consists of four sub-projects:
- Improved understanding of coastal risk and vulnerability exposure
- A vulnerability assessment framework that ‘fits’ the changing coastal risk
- Enabling proactive implementation of coastal adaptation
- Versatile adaptation of coastal infrastructure