Sandscaping for Mitigating Coastal Flood and Erosion Risk to Energy Infrastructure on Gravel Shorelines: a case study approach

The proposed research aims to extend work that is already underway for other coastal energy installations around the UK, to provide essential detail on future flood risk and impacts on existing coastal energy infrastructure and develop a decision-support tool (open source GIS) for guiding operational and strategic actions. This is essential for building resilience across the energy sector to extreme events (e.g. coastal storms, high river flows) and longer-term climate change (e.g. sea-level rise, wave climate) in a way that does not rely on emergency measures or impact greatly on consumer energy bills. The project also contributes significantly to taking forward our current energy strategy (nuclear new build, offshore renewables, energy infrastructure investment, building energy security), to enhancing flood resilience in coastal lowlands and low-lying river floodplains, and to reducing our reliance on hard engineering solutions to coastal defence.

Research is divided into two stages. The first is a flood risk assessment based on modeling extreme levels from sea-level rise, storms, wave overtopping and high river flows. This assessment will be the input to an open-source GIS to provide a range of energy and coastal stakeholders with a decision-support system (DSS) for operational and strategic planning. This builds directly on the methodology being developed as part of the ARCoES project (http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography-and-planning/research/adaptation-and-resilience-of-coastal-energy-supply/) for the NW region and nuclear sites at Hinkley Point, Sizewell, Bradwell and Sellafield. The DSS is designed as a decision-support tool for the energy industry in responding in a planned and timely way to extreme events and strategically to future climate change through staged investment. The DSS is also being used as a practical and accessible tool by coastal stakeholders and communities to identify the timing and location of key tipping points where/when strategic coastal planning options will need to be re-evaluated within existing shoreline management plans. The second stage is a scoping study for 'sandscaping' that follows the model being developed in the Netherlands for large-scale, self-sustaining beach recharge, thus providing the necessary sediment reservoir for coastal geomorphic systems to respond positively to sea-level rise and to be resilient to storm events. This innovative approach requires both fundamental and applied research to establish feasibility and to identify any negative consequences that might arise down-drift or offshore from the target site. Here, the project brings together state-of-the-art understanding and applications of hydrodynamic and sediment modeling from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) with business, engineering and environmental expertise in 'soft' coastal defence and strategic coastal planning at The Crown Estate (TCE) and Royal Haskoning-DHV (RHDHV) to establish a methodology for establishing the parameters for a sandscaping project with respect to coastal hydrodynamics, sediment source and transport, coastal morphological evolution, wider environmental impact, and project licensing. These two stages will be integrated in a case study focused on Dungeness as a representative gravel shoreline. Dungeness is not one of the study sites for ARCoES yet has emerged in the last year as a priority area for National Grid and Magnox Ltd. Consequently, the proposed collaboration addresses a pressing research need amongst a group of partners who are already working in partnership at sites across the UK.