"two academics in Germany, used cost-benefit analyses to calculate that only 13% of the world’s coastlines would be worth defending under their most pessimistic scenario, mostly in wealthy and densely populated parts of Europe, East Asia and the eastern United States. Conversely, 65% of coastline was not worth protecting under any scenario. People will have to move out of flood zones. Some rich countries have property buy-out schemes to encourage this, but so far these have been modest in scale..." https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2023/07/01/the-surprising-upside-of-climate-migration
The July1st-7th edition of The Economist has an interesting (but worrying) article about climate change adaptation from which i took the extract above. In this context, it makes sense to question why there are European countries that spend hundreds of million euros to pay for hundreds of millions of tons of sand in repeated beach nourishment operations? Why is this money not used to pay for property buy-outs?
PS - The 2023 report "Ocean sand: putting sand on the ocean sustainability agenda" mention that in the USA, more than 1.2 billion m3 of sand have been used for beach nourishment. Should Europe continue to follow the same failed recipes used by a country that has a poor record of adapting to climate change?
