Capturing coastal morphological change within regional integrated assessment: an outcome-driven fuzzy logic approach

Climate change will have pervasive effects on the world’s coasts, but at broad scales these changes have typically proven difficult to analyse in a systematic manner. This paper explores an outcome-driven deductive methodology for geomorphological analysis that structures current knowledge and understanding using fuzzy logic concepts. Building on recent large-scale coastal investigations and with reference to a case study of the East Anglian coast U.K, the methodology defines the active coastal system using a flexible generic classification and integrates expert opinion, using the notion of possibility, as a basis for the assessment of potential future geomorphological response to changes in sea level and sediment supply.

The proposed methodology produces a robust qualitative structure for assessment and forecasting of coastal geomorphology. Preliminary results for the East Anglian coast suggest that shoreline management is already having, and will continue to be, a significant influence on coastal evolution irrespective of the rate of sea-level rise. Therefore, significant potential exists to guide future coastal evolution towards preferred outcomes by using such methods as a component of adaptive shoreline management.