Coastal Management Software to Support the Decision-Makers to Mitigate Coastal Erosion

There are no sequential and integrated approaches that include the steps needed to perform an adequate management and planning of the coastal zones to mitigate coastal erosion problems and climate change effects. Important numerical model packs are available for users, but often looking deeply to the physical processes, demanding big computational efforts and focusing on specific problems. Thus, it is important to provide adequate tools to the decision-makers, which can be easily interpreted by populations, promoting discussions of optimal intervention scenarios in medium to long-term horizons. COMASO (coastal management software) intends to fill this gap, presenting a group of tools that can be applied in standalone mode, or in a sequential order. The first tool should map the coastal erosion vulnerability and risk, also including the climate change effects, defining a hierarchy of priorities where coastal defense interventions should be performed, or limiting/constraining some land uses or activities. In the locations identified as priorities, a more detailed analysis should consider the application of shoreline and cross-shore evolution models (second tool), allowing discussing intervention scenarios, in medium to long-term horizons. After the defined scenarios, the design of the intervention should be discussed, both in case of being a hard coastal structure or an artificial nourishment (third type of tools). Finally, a cost-benefit assessment tool should optimize the decisions, forecasting costs and benefits for each different scenario, through definition of economic values to the interventions and to the land/services/ecosystems, weighting all the environmental, cultural, social and historical aspects. It is considered that COMASO tools can help giving answers to the major problems of the coastal planning and management entities, integrating transversal knowledge in risk assessment, physical processes, engineering and economic evaluations. The integrated coastal zone management needs these tools to ensure sustainable coastal zones, mitigating erosion and climate change effects.