Sea level rise scenarios along the Mediterranean Coasts (SAVEMEDCOASTS)

Description:

Global mean sea level is expected represent one of the most serious impacts of climate change to face in the next years, especially in subsiding coasts of the Mediterranean, entailing widespread environmental changes, coastal retreat, marine flooding and loss of land, which will be subtracted to human activities. Sea level rise will amplify the impacts exerted by a multitude of hazards (storm surges flooding, coastal erosion and tsunamis) on infrastructure and building integrity, people safety, economic assets and cultural heritage. Together with vulnerability and exposure, hazard frequency and intensity will be responsible of multi-hazard scenarios, translating climate change impacts into socio-economic loss that will require civil protection measures.

SAVEMEDCOASTS addresses the challenge of mitigating these risks in the Mediterranean, providing multi-temporal scenarios of expected inland extension of marine flooding in consequence of sea level rise, preparing people to face the next changes. General objectives are: (i) to support civil protection at different levels and with different tools and methods, (ii) to produce exhaustive risk assessments for different periods and improve disaster risk reduction, (iii) to improve governance and raising community awareness towards the impacts of sea level rise and related hazardm, (iii) to foster cooperation amongst science, affected communities and civil protection organizations.

Within SAVEMEDCOASTS, a web-mapping system was launched in October 2017 to provide specialists, stakeholders, decision makers and common people project results in a simple way. The WebGIS platform is based on open-source solutions realized according the European standards (INSPIRE Directive). It provides a geospatial data-sharing hub for the project partners, as well as a user-friendly tool for creating interactive maps available for interested users. The WebGIS is populated with current and new acquisition data for the Mediterranean region. For the Italian (Cinque Terre and Lipari Island) and Greek (Lefkada Island) pilot sites, ultra-high resolution orthophotos and digital terrain models are available. It is accessible online through the project website homepage.

Project information

Lead

National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), Italy

Partners

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece

Centre of Integrated Geomorphology for the Mediterranean Area (CGIAM), Italy

Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Italy

ISO TECH LIMITED (ISOTECH), Cyprus

Regional Union of municipalities of ionian islands (PED IN), Greece

Source of funding

European Union Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection