Natural adaptation of coral reef islands to sea-level rise offering opportunities for ongoing human occupation (ARISE)

Originally submitted as an ERC Advanced Grant, but now funded by UKRI, the £2.8M ARISE project, led by Professor Gerd Masselink, is a follow-up from the GCRF funded project, 'Physical impacts of climate change on coral reef islands'.

Due to their low-lying nature, coral atoll islands are widely acknowledged to be amongst the most vulnerable environments to climate change. Most of them are predicted to be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise.
However, these forecasts are based on relatively simple hydrodynamic models that consider the islands immobile, whereas, when overwashed during storms, the islands can vertically accrete due to sediment deposition. Repeated overwash can enable atoll islands to keep up with rising sea level.

This potentially provides opportunities for island communities to prolong habitability through innovative adaptation strategies, instead of having to construct expensive coastal defences or traumatically relocate to regions with no flood risk.

It is generally accepted that overwash is key to atoll island survival, but further research is required to increase our quantitative understanding of overwash processes and transform the enhanced insights into practice by developing management tools.

The overarching aim of this project is therefore to ‘revolutionise our capability to model the physical impacts of sea-level rise on atoll islands to aid in the formulation, development and implementation of transformative climate-change adaptation strategies for atoll island communities’.