Climate Change Risks and Adaptation in Coastal Areas
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Tourism, Culture, and Heritage".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2019) | Viewed by 3295
Special Issue Editor
Interests: climate change; risks assessment; natural resource and environmental economics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate change is a major source of concern for our society in the XXI Century.
The interaction with environmental conditions has always been a preeminent characteristic of our way of living, but during last 20 years, some changes have occurred and coastal areas have been specially affected as we have been increasingly aware of our exposure to environmentally based risk and our social perception about it has changed.
Firstly. We our perception about the evolution of environmental based threats is that there is increasing trend in is relevance, either for the increasing severity of regular conditions and extreme events and the increasing frequency of the latter, or by the overexposure of our societies to the emerging hazard levels. We face now the consequences of our past spatial and assignment decision taken in the past without paying enough attention to environmental conditions.
Secondly, we face the challenge of adapting our society to new uncertain conditions, and this may represent just adapting our expectations, adapting our behaviors (learning to live under the new risk conditions) or developing a set of adaptation measures to keep the risk at a tolerable level.
These issues are especially relevant in coastal areas for several reasons. On one hand phenomena as SLR water acidification and extreme event, which are no doubt some of the most relevant sources of impact, are specifically affecting our coasts. However, on the other the concentration of human activities and wealth in coastal areas is another source of concern. During last 50 years, the attraction to urban and coastal areas has produced a clear increase on exposure levels and hence new policies are required to manage risk levels controlling exposure and vulnerability and enhancing social resilience.
Adaptation policy is becoming a huge challenge for our societies that will require mobilizing financial and technical resources at an unprecedented scale. The definition of efficient and robust policies combining technical, environmental, economic and social measures will require the development of a new paradigm. Intergenerational equity, robustness to unexpected conditions and tipping points, and flexibility to adapt to future conditions and strategies will enrich emerging technical, environmental and economic paradigm in an interdisciplinary framework.
The aim of this special issue is giving the required visibility to the state of the art of relevant knowledge and technology and opening a space for reflection on the actual framework where the trajectory of our interaction between our society and the environment to be developed in the future.
Prof. Dr. Pedro Diaz-Simal
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Climate Change
- Environmental Risk
- Adaptation
- Economics Climate Change
- Environmental Economics
