For centuries, coastlines have attracted dense human settlement and economic activity.
For centuries, coastlines have attracted dense human settlement and economic activity. Today, more than 40 percent of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast, where facing accelerating sea-level rise, coastal erosion, flooding, and tropical cyclones.
Although moving away from the coast - known as “retreat” - is often viewed as an adaptive strategy, its global extent and drivers have remained unclear. A new study published in Nature Climate Change fills this gap by providing the first global evidence that coastal retreat is driven more by social and infrastructural vulnerability than by historical exposure to hazards.
The study was conducted by an international team led by researchers from Sichuan University and included remote sensing experts from the University of Copenhagen (Alexander Prishchepov and Shengping Ding, IGN). It maps settlement movements across 1,071 coastal regions in 155 countries. By integrating nighttime light observations with global socioeconomic datasets, the researchers found that 56% of coastal regions have retreated from the coast from 1992 to 2019, and 16% of regions, including the Copenhagen area in Denmark, have moved closer to the coast, while 28% have remained stable.
Read more at: University of Copenhagen
Photo Credit: via Pixabay
