Coral Reef Degradation and Risks to Coastal Communities
As part of the U.S. Federal government’s recovery and restoration efforts, the USGS in developing projections of future change in the elevation of the seafloor due to coral reef ecosystem degradation (fig. 1) based on recently-developed maps of coral reef change over the past few decades (Yates and others, 2017). To better understanding the role that coral reefs play in reducing the risk to, and increasing the resilience of, reef-lined coastal communities, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) are undertaking an effort to assess and quantify, in social and economic terms, how the projected future coral reef degradation off Florida may increase the threats to, and reduced the resiliency of, its coastal communities.
Engineering, ecologic, social, and economic tools were combined to provide a quantitative valuation of the reduction in coastal protection benefits that would be caused by projected degradation of the coral reefs off the State of Florida, USA. The goal of this effort was to identify how, where, and when coral reef degradation would decrease coastal flood reduction benefits socially and economically (fig. 2).
This analysis follows a risk quantification valuation framework to estimate the risk reduction benefits from coral reefs and provide annual expected benefits in social and economic terms (Storlazzi and others, 2019). This mapping represents a first unique and innovative effort to rigorous quantify the increase in coastal hazard risk caused projected future coral reef degradation, based on high resolution flooding modeling and state of art damage modeling and calculations based on approaches used by FEMA. The methods follow a sequence of steps (fig. 3) that integrate physics-based hydrodynamic modeling, quantitative geospatial modeling, and social and economic analyses to quantify the hazard, the role forecasted coral reef degradation in increasing coastal flooding, and the economic and social consequences.
All of these data will be made available on our Coastal Change Hazards web portal for web viewing and download to provide actionable information to homeowners, coastal communities, and managers of public and private properties to improve resiliency for storm-induced coastal hazards.
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