CLIMATE CHANGE – AN ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACTS ON COASTAL ENGINEERING IN NORWAY

Author(s):  
Øivind A. Arntsen ◽  
Alf Tørum
Author(s):  
Iñigo J. Losada ◽  
Paula Camus ◽  
Alexandra Toimil ◽  
Antonio Espejo ◽  
Cristina Izaguirre

Coastal engineers play a leading role in assessing climate change impacts in coastal and low-lying areas and in the design and implementation of adaptation solutions to build resilient coastal systems. Given the continuous growth of coastal communities and assets along the world coastlines, the need to protect and preserve natural and socioeconomic coastal systems and the escalating impacts of climate change (Wong et al. 2014), there is an urgent demand by decision makers for coastal engineering practice dealing with risk assessment and adaptation under high levels of uncertainty.


Author(s):  
Carmen Castillo ◽  
Álvaro Galán ◽  
Raquel Balmaseda ◽  
Ana María Díaz ◽  
Elena Calcerrada

In many countries worldwide, a strong economical effort in the construction of coastal infrastructures has already been faced. Nowadays, due to the financial crisis, most of the efforts are devoted to the conservation and maintenance of coastal structures instead of building new ones. Furthermore, the expected variations in sea level and met-ocean conditions due to climate change modify the stochastic nature of both wave loading and structural response which is different nowadays from that at the time the structures were designed. These facts encourage the coastal engineering community towards the development of reliable risk management and decision-making tools. A key point in the decision-making process is how to prioritize investments when deciding about adaptation or mitigation alternatives. This paper aims at providing a proposal including tips to select among the possible alternatives based on risk analysis and how each alternative modifies the risk level compared to the do-nothing alternative. An example on a Spanish port will be provided for better understanding.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Roslyn Gleadow ◽  
Jim Hanan ◽  
Alan Dorin

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moss ◽  
James Oswald ◽  
David Baines

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