What to expect

Coastal areas play an important role as places of settlement, trade and industry. World-wide more than around 100 million people worldwide live in flood-prone or potentially flood-prone areas. Without coastal protection and technical and administrative coastal protection measures, large parts of coastal areas would be regularly flooded and thus not or hardly useable. This is particularly evident, for example, in the low-lying marsh areas of northern Germany, which would be regularly flooded without coastal protection and also obvious for an Island like Taiwan where the safety of all activities at the coast depend on an effective coastal protection. Taiwan is located in the subtropical zone and is always threatened by typhoons that cause enormous losses of the human life and property every year especially in coastal areas. Changing climate influences the processes taking place in coastal zone and has an impact on current and future coastal protection. Hydrometeorological loads on coastal areas and coastal protection structures will increase. In order to ensure future settlement and trade activities in these areas and to protect the coasts from the effects of climate change, it is necessary to rethink coastal protection strategies and measures. The focus here is on sustainable nature-based a strategies and measures.