Sea level rise represents the most significant threat to beaches forcing their retreat/erosion. As part of the Saint Lucia case study, a beach retreat prediction methodology was used to assess the ranges of long- and short-term beach retreats/erosion for different beach slopes in Saint Lucia, as well as sediment textures (grain size) and wave conditions, under different scenarios of mean sea level rise changes and/or storm induced sea level rises.
The benefits of this approach include:
- This approach provides reasonable assessments of potential ranges of beach retreat under marine forcing (i.e. sea levels and waves) on the basis of (minimal) environmental information that can be obtained relatively easily.
- It provides ranges (maximum and minimum) of the horizontal excursion of cross-shore beach retreat/inundation, which could then be compared to the beach width that could be easily determined by remote-sensed imagery.
A toolbox is constructed to simplify the approach developed under the project and to allow replicability of this methodology by SIDS. The toolbox is provided as a Guided User Interface (GUI) suite. It is user- friendly, fast and requires no great expertise for its operation.
The Manual presents the beach retreat prediction methodology along with instructions on the use of the toolbox.
