Climate risk assessment | The Mediterranean​ coast

Sustainable Development Goals:

Numerous scientific studies have identified the Mediterranean region as a climate change hotspot. Investigating the role of climate and non-climate drivers on coastal zones is vital to understand the underlying risks and identify appropriate response measures. Existing scientific uncertainties demand flexibility when planning for adaptation to climate and non-climate driven changes.​

A multi-scale coastal risk index has several advantages that make such a methodology particularly suitable to help making decisions despite scarce resources, limited local data and uncertain information about the future. ​

The Coastal Risk Index applied at the scale of the Mediterranean region (CRI-MED), was initially developed and applied to eleven countries within the ClimVar project "Integration of climate variability and change in national strategies to implement the ICZM Protocol in Mediterranean”, funded by the Plan Bleu, and successively extended to all the other Mediterranean countries. The main lesson emerged from this assessment is that risk hotspots are always areas of extremely high vulnerability, but it is not a biunivocal relation. In fact, not all areas of extremely high vulnerability can be considered hotspots, because of the interaction with the effects of forcing and exposure.​

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Financial partner: Plan Bleu​

​Years: 2016-2017​

Website: planbleu.org/en/regional-coastal-risk-assessment-map​​​