Developing sustainable sand nourishment strategies to create resilient coastal landscapes.

Accelerated sea-level rise threatens coastal areas globally. Moreover, housing and socio-economic developments cause increasing pressure on coastal land use. Without adaptation a so-called coastal squeeze will occur with a narrowed beach-dune system. This endangers these systems and puts coastal communities at risk of flooding. The coastal ecosystem’s response combined with human interventions will be critical for the future of our sandy coasts. The SOURCE philosophy is that carefully planned sand nourishments in the present will create the required and desired resilient and dynamic multifunctional coastal landscapes of the future.

SOURCE will deliver the knowledge, models and design tools to develop and evaluate nourishment strategies in a multi-stakeholder co-creation process. This will be accomplished by a unique combination of fundamental coastal ecosystem understanding, reliable predictive modeling, determining the social costs and benefits, and an integral nourishment design and evaluation process. Our Living Labs are two sand nourishments along the Dutch coast. These will be co-designed, monitored and evaluated by the SOURCE researchers and 25 (inter)national partners from government organizations, research institutes, nature organizations and industry.