CSDMS 2021: Changing Landscapes and Seascapes: Modeling for Discovery, Decision Making, and Communication
From Coastal Retreat to Seaward Growth: Emergent Behaviors from Paired Community Beach Nourishment Choices
Abstract
Coastal communities facing shoreline erosion preserve their beaches both for recreation and for property protection. One approach is nourishment, the placement of externally-sourced sand to increase the beach’s width, forming an ephemeral protrusion that requires periodic re-nourishment. Nourishments add value to beachfront properties, thereby affecting re-nourishment choices for an individual community. However, the shoreline represents an alongshore-connected system, such that morphodynamics in one community are influenced by actions in neighboring communities. Prior research suggests coordinated nourishment decisions between neighbors were economically optimal, though many real-world communities have failed to coordinate, and the geomorphic consequences of which are unknown. Toward understanding this geomorphic-economic relationship, we develop a coupled model representing two neighboring communities and an adjacent non-managed shoreline. Within this framework, we examine scenarios where communities coordinate nourishment choices to maximize their joint net benefit versus scenarios where decision-making is uncoordinated such that communities aim to maximize their independent net benefits. We examine how community-scale property values affect choices produced by each management scheme and the economic importance of coordinating. The geo-economic model produces four behaviors based on nourishment frequency: seaward growth, hold the line, slow retreat, and full retreat. Under current conditions, coordination is strongly beneficial for wealth-asymmetric systems, where less wealthy communities acting alone risk nourishing more than necessary relative to their optimal frequency under coordination. For a future scenario, with increased material costs and background erosion due to sea-level rise, less wealthy communities might be unable to afford nourishing their beach independently and thus lose their beachfront properties.
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