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REVIEW article

Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Geohazards and Georisks
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1351581
This article is part of the Research Topic Women in Science: Geohazards and Georisks 2022 View all 7 articles

A comprehensive database of land subsidence in 143 major coastal cities around the world: an overview of the issues, causes and future challenges

Provisionally accepted
Laura Pedretti Laura Pedretti 1Alessia Giarola Alessia Giarola 1*Mandy Korff Mandy Korff 2John Lambert John Lambert 2Claudia Meisina Claudia Meisina 1
  • 1 University of Pavia, Pavia, Lombardy, Italy
  • 2 Deltares (Netherlands), Delft, Netherlands

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Subsidence, the gradual lowering or the sudden sinking of the ground surface, is known to cause impact in terms of damage to infrastructures, utility lines, buildings and changes in surficial drainage system and groundwater conditions. Additionally, the impacts of land subsidence will be greater in the future considering the sea level rise, the population growth, the intensification of coastal erosion and extreme events, the increase of flood risk or freshwater salinization, mostly in coastal cities. The main aim of this work is to provide an open-source, peer-reviewed and comprehensive database that identifies the main and secondary causes of land subsidence in 143 coastal cities. It highlighted how in some at-risk cities the potential impact of subsidence is still unknown and no mitigation measures exist. The database additionally showed that mitigation measures, specifically those addressing subsidence due to groundwater extraction, have proven successful in the past. The database (Pedretti et al., 2023; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8349293) aims to increase the knowledge of the phenomenon and to rise the global awareness of land subsidence issues among the researchers, the scientific community, the stakeholders and the policymakers also in terms of urban planning and development.

    Keywords: subsidence1, database2, coastal3, groundwater4, cities5

    Received: 06 Dec 2023; Accepted: 12 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pedretti, Giarola, Korff, Lambert and Meisina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Alessia Giarola, University of Pavia, Pavia, 27100, Lombardy, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.