Commentary: Here’s one way to protect California’s beaches from rising seas: Stop messing with them
Protecting our coasts from sea level rise is increasingly urgent, especially for densely populated coastal communities such as Southern California’s. Coastal flooding and beach erosion from rising seas and storms are far more than a threat; they’re already happening in many places in California and beyond. But new research suggests one relatively simple means of shoring up our beaches: leaving them alone.
As I and my colleagues at UC Santa Barbara and our partner institutions showed in a, natural dune formation can help restore and adapt urban coasts to climate change. In fact, we found that natural processes can cause the sands to rise much faster than the seas.
