As the impacts of climate change intensify, coastal regions face increasing risks from sea level rise, stronger storm surges, and more frequent flooding. While traditional engineering solutions such as seawalls and levees have been effective, their environmental and economic costs have led to increased interest in sustainable nature-based alternatives. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining recognition for their potential to enhance coastal resiliency by utilizing natural systems like mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass meadows, coral reefs, and dunes to protect coastlines. These solutions provide additional co-benefits, such as biodiversity preservation, carbon sequestration, habitat creation, and water purification, while offering adaptive responses to dynamic climate challenges. This research topic will explore the scope of NbS for coastal flood protection, including but not limited to examining their effectiveness, design, implementation, monitoring, integration into policy, and socio-economic impacts. Examples of topics are as follows: • Benefits for coastal erosion control, storm surge and wave mitigation, and flood risk reduction. • Approaches for designing, modeling, and optimizing NbS, including hybrid green-gray approaches. • Incorporating NbS into coastal management and climate adaptation plans. • Regulatory and institutional challenges for scaling NbS. • Economic assessments and valuation of NbS flood risk reduction benefits. • Community engagement and social acceptance of NbS. • Predicting NbS performance under future climate scenarios. • Decision-support tools, risk assessment frameworks, and climate models for NbS. • Using machine learning, AI, and remote sensing to monitor and optimize NbS. • Lessons learned from successful and challenging NbS projects.
(Research submissions supported by the US Coastal Research Program (USCRP) or US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) are invited to the other research topic here: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/66482/coastal-adaptation-through-nature-natural-and-nature-based-features-nnbf-research)
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