Coastal engineering evolution in low-lying areas and adaptation practice since the eleventh century, Jiangsu Province, C
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Coastal engineering evolution in low-lying areas and adaptation practice since the eleventh century, Jiangsu Province, China Junlin Bao, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 14 November 2018 / Accepted: 14 May 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Coastal engineering is an important measure in coping with coastal risks. With global warming and sea level rising, the sustainable adaptation of the low-lying areas becomes urgent. An in-depth understanding of the relationship between coastal engineering and environmental changes can help improve the adaptation capability for climate change. Here, we use historical documents and synthesis approach to examine coastal engineering evolution on the Jiangsu coast, the largest lowland area along China’s coastlines, and explore its response to local sea level and land use changes. The results show that coastal engineering here experienced a long-term period centered on sea-dike construction, with a shift from primary function of storm surge prevention since the eleventh century, towards a green coastal engineering approach in recent years. On the century scale, there was a close connection between local sea level change and coastal engineering change, while on the ten-year scale, population dynamics and land use changes were the key driving factors. Since the future climate and sea level change magnitude will be beyond what has been observed on the Jiangsu coast, it would be sensible to define a “critical time” that divides the near future and remote future. On such a basis, a strategic plan for the remote future may be formulated to prepare for the critical time when inevitable inundation occurs, and a second strategic plan may be adopted for the near future, to buy time for the coastal communities to make necessary preparations and at the same time to continue to use the resources. For the “near future,” a green coastal engineering approach (in combination with the experiences gained from the Jiangsu coast) should be developed to provide a low cost, high efficiency technique for coastal defense schemes. The thoughts outlined above may be applicable also to a number of low-lying coastal regions of developing countries. Keywords Coastal engineering . Local sea level . Land use change . Low-lying coasts . Human adaptation . China’s Jiangsu coast
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-02002738-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Climatic Change
1 Introduction Coastal zone is one of the key regions for global change and human adaptation research. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among scholars in climate change adaptation of the low-lying coasts, i.e., low elevation (less than 10 m) coastal zone (Cheong 2011; Wong et al. 2014). This special region, in the world, constitutes 2% of total land area but contains 10% of total population and 13% of total urban population (McGranahan et al. 2007; Vafeidis et al. 2011). Meanwhil
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