Event Summary
Organization: Deltares, SimpleCoast, GFDRR & World Bank Group
Description
Small Island States around the globe are very susceptible to natural disasters: storm surges, coastal erosion, cyclones, tsunamis, flash floods from rivers, can have devastating consequences at those countries. Moreover, these effects are exacerbated by global climate change, climate variability and sea level rise. As their population, agricultural land and infrastructure tend to be concentrated in the coastal zone, any rise in sea level will have significant and profound effects on their economies and living conditions; the very survival of certain low-lying countries will be threatened. Unfortunately, some of these countries also lack the data and technical capacity in hydraulic and coastal engineering as well as the socio-economic skills to properly assess the most cost-effective interventions appropriate to each vulnerable coastal area, particularly when the affected areas are relatively small, poor and very vulnerable.
This session presented some of the work and tools which are being developed within the Simple Coast study, part of SISRI (“Small Island State Resilience Initiative” – GFDRR). The project aims to assist practitioners to carry out simple assessment of problems and design of adaptation and disaster risk management solutions with the use of simple and freely available tools and knowledge notes downloadable from a website. The knowledge notes and tools will be available for further use anytime in the future, also within other projects. Among others, tools and instruments are being developed for the assessment of coastal engineering problems (e.g. coastal erosion, flooding), interventions (e.g. design of sand nourishments, structures, coral reefs), adaptive planning, simple monitoring techniques and facilitated by the use of serious games. The session provided explanations and allowed discussion on how to use the different tools, with tutorial and examples from real applications. The session was facilitated by the use of a serious game developed for Small Island States.
Part of the session was fully dedicated to recent development in numerical modeling techniques for coral reefs islands.
Presentations
Dealing with coastal risks in Small Island States. Training session on Simple Assessments of Coastal Problems and Solutions in Small Island Developing States – Alessio Giardino, Deltares
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