About this Research Topic

Background

Low elevation coastal zones (LECZ) are extensive throughout the world. LECZ communities are threatened by inundation from sea level rise, storm surge, wetland degradation, land subsidence, and hydrological flooding. Coastal inundation is accompanied by wetlands drowning, destruction of homes and infrastructure, water-borne health hazards, and loss of livelihoods. To anticipate long and short-term inundation impacts, scientists must predict processes spanning the ecological, physical, social, and health sciences. Adaptation requires a host of new strategies, numerical predictions, and engineering solutions.

For this Research Topic, we intend to solicit innovative and interdisciplinary papers to address linkages of:
(1) human and socioeconomic vulnerabilities,
(2) public health and safety,
(3) economic concerns,
(4) land loss,
(5) wetland threats,
(6) coastal inundation,
(7) management and policy issues, and
(8) strategies and tools for improving communication among scientists, stakeholders, policymakers, and coastal residents.

The vision is to enhance the future resilience of Low-Elevation Coastal Zone communities by advancing understandings and approaches to better anticipate and mitigate hazards to human health, safety and welfare and reduce deleterious impacts on coastal residents and industries. The overarching goal of the proposed collection is to assemble a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary papers that contribute to a better understanding of the non-linear couplings (including tipping points and cascading effects) among the storm surge, hydrology, urban infrastructure, ecosystem dynamics, and humanity and offer management and engineering solutions tailored for different regions. Better communication of information and understanding among residents and officials is essential and original papers that offer approaches for non-technical outreach to stakeholders are welcome. Essential capabilities must ultimately include an open science network that assembles and distributes data and model code to assess risk and its causes, support adaptive management, and improve the resiliency of communities. Integrating natural, social, and health sciences as well as innovative engineering.

Complex systems modeling results are urgently needed to anticipate future coastal threats. Climate change is increasingly being accompanied by the combining of multiple hazardous processes to create “compound events”. Papers that apply socio-ecological frameworks to deal with compound floods and their impacts, including human health impacts are invited. Physical, environmental, economic, and social changes in coastal areas interact, accumulate, and occasionally, reach a tipping point. More rigorous papers on tipping points and cascading physical, ecological, socioeconomic effects, or multi-faceted complex systems are needed. We invite contributions based on observational or numerically modeled research results linking natural and built environmental and socioeconomic impacts of climate change on coasts and coastal communities. Regional case studies and global projections are both welcome.

Keywords: Coastal inundation, coastal communities, coastal erosion, socioeconomic vulnerabilities, human health impacts of coastal flooding, coastal engineering, oceanography, ecosystem loss, coastal tipping points, climate change refugees

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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