The effectiveness of coral reefs for coastal hazard risk reduction and adaptation

By F. Ferrario, M. Beck, C. Storlazzi, Fiorenza Micheli, C. Shepard, L. Airoldi. Nature Communications, 2014

865 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The world’s coastal zones are experiencing rapid development and an increase in storms and flooding. These hazards put coastal communities at heightened risk, which may increase with habitat loss. Here we analyse globally the role and cost effectiveness of coral reefs in risk reduction. Meta-analyses reveal that coral reefs provide substantial protection against natural hazards by reducing wave energy by an average of 97%. Reef crests alone dissipate most of this energy (86%). There are 100 million or more people who may receive risk reduction benefits from reefs or bear hazard mitigation and adaptation costs if reefs are degraded. We show that coral reefs can provide comparable wave attenuation benefits to artificial defences such as breakwaters, and reef defences can be enhanced cost effectively. Reefs face growing threats yet there is opportunity to guide adaptation and hazard mitigation investments towards reef restoration to strengthen this first line of coastal defence. The risks of flooding to coastal communities are increasing due to coastal development and climate change. Here, the authors use meta-analyses to quantitatively show that coral reefs can significantly reduce risks from natural hazards, and that reef defences can be enhanced cost effectively.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab792f5bc608d2654bad9321f18edcffedbd7e9a

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Citations in the corpus

Biogeomorphology of the Mediterranean Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows (2017, background): “…attenuation have also been reported for other marine coastal habitats, such as kelp forests (Kobayashi, 1993, and references cited therein), tidal marshes (Neumeier and Ciavola, 2004; Möller et al., 2014) and coral reefs (Hardy and Young, 1996; Ferrario et al., 2014, and references cited therein).”
Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean (2015, background): “other living reefs can dissipate up to 97% of the wave energy reaching them, thus protecting built structures and human lives (70).”
Harnessing ecological processes to facilitate coral restoration (2018, neutral): “…a key source of fisheries production (Moberg and Folke 1999), and provide shoreline protection for over 100 million people living in coastal areas (Ferrario et al. 2014). sc However, corals are in rapid decline on many reefs due to global stressors associated with climate change, such as…”
Mapping the global value and distribution of coral reef tourism (2017, background): “There is also a sizeable literature on the multiple ecosystem functions provided by coral reefs which may support tourism benefits, including the generation of fine sand beaches [24], the maintenance and building of islands [25,26], protection from wave erosion and storm damage [27], and the product”
Elasticity in ecosystem services: exploring the variable relationship between ecosystems and human well-being (2016, background): “Thus we address some additional complexities highlighted by the more holistic model of Fisher et al. (2014) but incorporate these into a more linear flow like the cascade, while maintaining an emphasis on the disaggregation of beneficiaries (Daw et al. 2011).”
Coral reef ecosystem services in the Anthropocene (2019, background): “Some of the most well‐ studied provisioning services include fisheries (e.g. Grafeld, Oleson, Teneva, & Kittinger, 2017), cultural services include recreation and tourism (Brander, Beukering, & Cesar, 2007), and regulating services include coastal protection (Ferrario et al., 2014).”
An Overview of the Animal Forests of the World (2017, background): “Tropical coral reefs, for instance, provide food and leisure to human communities living in tropical coastal areas and contribute to dampening the effects of storms and hurricanes, dissipating up to 86 % of the wave energy (Ferraio et al. 2014).”
Infragravity waves: From driving mechanisms to impacts (2018, neutral): “Over reefs, incident-band (and predominantly remotely-generated swell) waves break in a narrow surf zone on the reef edge, where most of the waves are dissipated and little energy (typically 2% in the short-wave band, Ferrario et al. (2014)) is transmitted to shore.”
The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people (2016, background): “We must also recognize the role that intact natural ecosystems, particularly large areas, play in overcoming the challenges that climate change presents, not only as important repositories for carbon but also because of their ability to buffer and regulate local climate regimes and help human popula”