Coastal Protection
Climate change and its coastal impacts, increasing threats to coastal communities as well an accelerated demand for risk management and adaptation to future extremes and steady or abrupt changes (Fröhle, Schüttrumpf & Thorenz 2017; Ratter & Leyshon 2021, de Guttry & Ratter 2022) require changes in the rationale of coastal protection.
Based on these insights, desktop work and more than 50 interviews conducted with islanders, administrative staff and scientists exhibit that there is a wide-spread need for transdisciplinary collaboration to get soon prepared for adapting to climate change. Even though imaginaries about climate futures vary (Döring, Walsh & Ratter 2022), the interviews reveal that diking is no longer conceived necessarily as the ultima ratio for coastal protection.
Hence, there is space for thinking about and the willingness to test so-called Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) in which – scientifically seen – the notion of the “natural” is ambiguous and not clear as our empirical work exhibits. These aspects are backed-up by the analysis of classical and NbS-solutions for coastal protection with respect to the environmental, hydrodynamic and geomorphological conditions on the two islands of Amrum and Föhr (Jordan & Fröhle 2022).