Research Priorities For Australian Coastal Geoscience And Engineering: Policy Brief 

Australia’s coastal communities, environments, and infrastructure are increasingly under threat. Climate change will exacerbate these issues and present immense challenges for our coastal regions. There is a critical need for a strategic and coordinated response to these challenges. Our recently published research [1] identifies the priority research actions and strategies that need to be addressed by the coastal geoscience and engineering community over the next decade to ensure we are best placed to adapt to these challenges. Recommendations arising from this research and relevant background and key points are detailed below along with the potential benefits of taking a proactive approach to managing our coast.

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Recommendations:

1. Undertake focussed research to better understand extreme events and quantify the future impacts of climate change on our coastal environments and infrastructure.

2. Undertake focussed research to better understand our two most critical coastal challenges: coastal inundation and shoreline change (including coastal erosion).

3. Remove barriers to collaboration across the professional community (government, academia, consulting/industry) to provide for best outcomes for all stakeholders.

4. Engage coastal communities and stakeholders throughout the coastal management process to be educated and take ownership over management issues.

5. Develop a national coastal data collection strategy, framework, and organisation. This expanded data collection combined with enhanced data access (Recommendation 6) will enable expanded research effort and nationally consistent data collection methods.

6. Develop a national coastal data repository and custodian with a data compilation and access strategy that compiles all existing coastal data and makes all data publicly accessible. 

7. Establish a dedicated coastal research observatory to support effort in coastal science and engineering research and coordinate a national level approach to solving these challenges. This needs to be undertaken across the professional community (government, academia, and consultancy/industry) alongside community.
    

Background and key points:

Australians are mostly a nation of coastal dwellers with over 85% of us living within 50 km of the coastline. Climate change will drive enormous challenges for our coastal communities, with sea level rise and other factors making protection of our coast ever more critical. Adaptation to coastal hazards has been identified as a high priority initiative by Infrastructure Australia and there is a critical need for a strategic and coordinated response to the challenges we face. Key relevant background points for this issues are outlined below.

• Climate change induced sea level rise and changes in storminess will increasingly threaten coastal environments, infrastructure, and homes with exposure to these hazards increasing as sea levels rise over the coming years.

• 85% of Australians live within 50 km of our coastlines and 50% live within 7 km of the coast.

• Exposure of infrastructure and properties to inundation within estuaries has been shown to be a far greater problem in NSW, for example, than that of exposure to open coast erosion which, while significant, is an order of magnitude less than exposure to inundation [2, 3].

• In NSW alone, coastal flooding due to rising sea levels threatens over 70,000 properties during an extreme event (1 in 100 year storm surge) under a 1 m sea level rise scenario [2].

• A “Coastal hazards adaptation strategy” is listed as one of 17 high priority initiatives in Infrastructure Australia’s Infrastructure Priority List, February 2021, highlighting a critical need to address these issues over the next 15 years [4].

• Many of the fundamental data that underpin system knowledge required to address these issues do not exist or are not collated nor widely accessible.

  • As an example, long term records of ocean wave heights from wave buoys that allow for predictions of wave driven hazards such as coastal erosion are almost exclusively limited to the southeast of Australia precluding the development of accurate hazard assessments for other coastal regions.

  • Coastal asset monitoring has traditionally been undertaken on an ad hoc or needs basis after an intervention or extreme event. Expanded and ongoing asset monitoring before, during, and after any engineering or nature based human intervention will provide best-practice advice for coastal managers.

• Targeted and strategic research in coastal geoscience and engineering can drive proactive management and informed planning to mitigate growing coastal risk impacts in a changing climate. It can also provide key social, environmental, and economic benefits to Australia including:

  • Engaged and resilient communities that are best placed to adapt to a changing environment.

  • The preservation of coastal ecosystems and their critical services such as the cushioning of potential hazard impacts.

  • Avoiding costs that would be otherwise borne from reactionary responses to changing environments and future hazards.

• Recent research [4] identifies the priority research actions and strategies that need to be addressed by coastal geoscience and engineering researchers over the next decade. Recommendations arising from this research are detailed below. 

 

The full study that this brief is based on is available here [1]. 

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Download a PDF copy of this brief here.

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References 

1. Power, H. E. et al. (2021). "Research priorities for coastal geoscience and engineering: A collaborative exercise in priority setting from Australia." Frontiers in Marine Science 8: 252.

2. Hanslow, D. J. et al. (2018). "A Regional Scale Approach to Assessing Current and Potential Future Exposure to Tidal Inundation in Different Types of Estuaries." Scientific Reports 8(1): 7065.

3. Kinsela, M. A. et al. (2017). "Second-Pass Assessment of Potential Exposure to Shoreline Change in New South Wales, Australia, Using a Sediment Compartments Framework." Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 5: 61.

4. Infrastructure Australia (2021). Infrastructure Priority List: Project and Initiative Summaries.

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Authors

Associate Professor Hannah Power

    School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

Dr Andrew Pomeroy

    Oceans Institute, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia

Dr Michael Kinsela

    Geocoastal Research Group, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Dr Thomas Murray
    Coastal and Marine Research Centre, Cities Research Institute, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia