The world’s beaches are being washed away as coastal developments increase in size and engineers build ever-higher sea walls to defend against fierce winter storms and rising sea levels, according to two of the worlds’ leading marine geologists.
The warning comes as violent Atlantic and Pacific storms last week sent massive 15.2m waves crashing over sea defenses, washed away beaches and destroyed concrete walls in Europe, North America and the Philippines.
“Most natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of the shore,” University of Ulster professor of coastal studies Andrew Cooper said.
Illustration: Tania Chou
“The widespread damage on western Europe’s storm-battered shores, the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy along the northeastern US seaboard and the deaths brought on by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines all exemplify the total inadequacy of [coastal] infrastructure and the vulnerability of cities built on the edge of coastlines,” Duke University professor of earth and ocean sciences Orrin Pilkey said.
Pilkey and Cooper said in a new book, The Last Beach, that sea walls, which are widely believed by many local authorities to protect developments from erosion and sea level rise, in fact lead to the destruction of beaches and sea defenses and require constant rebuilding at increasing cost.
Dunes and wide beaches protect buildings from storms far better than sea walls, the authors said.
“The beach is a wonderful, free natural defense against the forces of the ocean. Beaches absorb the power of the ocean waves, reducing them to a gentle swash that laps on the shoreline. Storms do not destroy beaches. They change their shape and location, moving sand around to maximize the absorption of wave energy and then recover in the days, months and years to follow,” Pilkey said.
Beaches in nature are almost indestructible, but seawall construction disrupts the natural movement of sand and waves, hindering the process of sand deposition along the shorelines, Cooper said.
“The wall itself is the problem. If you build a sea wall to protect the shore, the inevitable consequence is that the beach will disappear. The wall cannot absorb the energy of the sea. All beaches with defenses ... are in danger. When you build the sea wall, that is the end of the beach,” he said.
“Beaches have become long, narrow engineering projects sustained only by constant maintenance and ongoing expenditures. Ugly seawalls have removed beaches altogether. Trying to hold the shoreline in position makes a flexible response to sea level rise more difficult,” Pilkey said.
Many of the world’s most famous beaches are now ecologically dead and dependent for their survival on being replenished with sand or gravel, they said.
“The death knell has already sounded for large stretches of beaches along densely developed shorelines like those in Florida, Spain’s Costa del Sol, Australia’s Gold Coast and Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro,” Pilkey said.
Driven by tourism and trade, coastlines have become home to a growing proportion of the world’s population, but no country will be able to prevent its beaches from being washed away and its defenses destroyed, the authors warned.
As sea level rise adds to the damage done by the increasingly frequent storms expected with climate change, retreat from the shoreline will become imperative — but next to impossible.
“We will have to retreat [from the shoreline]. There is no choice. In economic terms alone, it will be impossible to defend everything. Defending cities like London or Rotterdam in Europe means there will be no money for all the other smaller seaside towns,” Cooper said.
Sea-level rise will mean that cities will have to build much higher sea walls to survive and this will cause beaches to disappear.
“A world without beaches is a distinct possibility. [Coastal cities] will end up with massively high sea walls. In years to come you may not be able to see the sea from many developments [in places like Florida] except from second or third floors. By building high-rise developments along coastlines, we have made it impossible to retreat,” he said.
The authors accuse engineering consultancies and government agencies of promoting a hard-engineering, anti-ecological, short-term response to beach erosion.
“The US Army Corps of Engineers, the Dutch institute for Delta Technologies in Holland and HR Wallingford in the UK are major movers in shoreline engineering, whose whole raison d’etre is to make money by building defenses,” Pilkey said.
However, their work often proves misguided, he said.
“After Hurricane Sandy hit the US east coast in 2011, the Corps pumped 200,000m3 of sand on to Atlantic Beach, New Jersey. Within five months it had disappeared, leaving a 9m-high cliff cut into the shoreline, and an estimated bill of US$4 million to deal with it,” he said.
“Rising seas around the world will multiply these bills by millions because of such misguided, short-term schemes, with beaches needing to be replaced every few years,” he said.
However, Jonathan Simm, technical director for flood management at HR Wallingford defended engineers.
“We are but servants. There are some very difficult social and political decisions that have to be made about which frontages should be defended. Engineers get stuck in the middle between different ... political and technical arguments,” he said.
“The reality is that major urban conurbations are going to want to sustain their existing defenses, but a lot of beaches are under stress, so the engineering is going to become much more expensive,” Simm said.
Sea-level rise, which is expected to raise levels significantly over the next 100 years, will affect beaches in different ways, Pilkey said.
“Although the sea has only risen a foot [0.3m] over the last 100 years or so, that amount can have a real impact on shoreline retreat on very gently sloping coasts. In theory, a one-foot sea-level rise should push the shoreline back 2,000 feet [609m],” he said.
As beaches disappear, countries are turning to increasingly expensive sand replenishment programs that dump thousands of tonnes of dredged sand on existing, eroded beaches.
However, these artificial beaches usually erode at least twice as fast as natural beaches and can only ever be a temporary solution, Cooper said.
“As time goes on and as the sea level rises, the interval of re-replenishment will get shorter because the beach becomes less stable. Beach replenishment is only a plaster that must be applied again and again at great cost. It doesn’t remove the problem, it treats the symptoms. Eventually and inevitably, beach replenishment will stop as either sand or money runs out,” he said.
It also smothers all life on the beach.
“The near-shore food chain that originates with the tiny organisms living between grains of sands and surviving on occasional influxes of seaweed is now gone. The whole ecosystem is out of whack. Habitats for turtle and bird nesting are being destroyed,” Cooper said.
“We have a mentality to just rebuild everything after a storm. The simplest solution would be to move the infrastructure back. The problem is the obsession with building and defending property right next to the beach and to hold the beach in place. This process just destroys the beach,” he said.
Taiwan’s victory in the World Baseball Softball Confederation Premier12 championship is an historic achievement. Yet once again this achievement is marred by the indignity of the imposed moniker “Chinese Taipei.” The absurdity is compounded by the fact that none of the players are even from Taipei, and some, such as Paiwan catcher Giljegiljaw Kungkuan, are not even ethnically Chinese. The issue garnered attention around the Paris Olympics, yet fell off the agenda as Olympic memories retreated. “Chinese Taipei” persists, and the baseball championship serves as a reminder that fighting “Chinese Taipei” must be a continuous campaign, not merely resurfacing around international
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) appears to be encountering some culture shock and safety issues at its new fab in Arizona. On Nov. 7, Arizona state authorities cited TSMC for worker safety violations, fining the company US$16,131, after a man died in May. The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health released its six-month investigation into the fatality and cited TSMC for failing to keep the workplace free from hazards likely to cause death or serious harm. At about the same time, the chip giant was also sued for alleged discriminatory hiring practices favoring Asians, prompting a flurry of debate on whether TSMC’s
This month, the National Health Insurance (NHI) is to implement a major policy change by eliminating the suspension-and-resumption mechanism for Taiwanese residing abroad. With more than 210,000 Taiwanese living overseas — many with greater financial means than those in Taiwan — this reform, catalyzed by a 2022 Constitutional Court ruling, underscores the importance of fairness, sustainability and shared responsibility in one of the world’s most admired public healthcare systems. Beyond legal obligations, expatriates have a compelling moral duty to contribute, recognizing their stake in a system that embodies the principle of health as a human right. The ruling declared the prior
US president-elect Donald Trump is inheriting from President Joe Biden a challenging situation for American policy in the Indo-Pacific region, with an expansionist China on the march and threatening to incorporate Taiwan, by force if necessary. US policy choices have become increasingly difficult, in part because Biden’s policy of engagement with China, including investing in personal diplomacy with President Xi Jinping (習近平), has not only yielded little but also allowed the Chinese military to gain a stronger footing in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. In Xi’s Nov. 16 Lima meeting with a diminished Biden, the Chinese strongman signaled little
RSS