Land reclamations and beach design
Coastlines face growing pressure from rising demand and climate change impacts like sea level rise. Deltares helps clients develop resilient, sustainable beach designs and land reclamations, preferably integrated into the natural environment. By aligning with functional requirements and using tailored knowledge, tools, and models, we optimise both new and existing coastal developments.
Our expertise
Deltares has an extensive track record in studies focussing on beach development and coastline dynamics. Our expertise is integrated in the tailored advice we provide to our clients, on the design and protection of beach developments such as:
- Land reclamations
- Coastal schemes
- Adaptive nourishment strategies (related to e.g., climate change and sea level rise)
- Integrated nature-based solutions, meeting different societal needs and ecosystem services
Our expertise combined with a thorough understanding of relevant physical processes in the natural environment and in-house state-of-the-art process-based numerical models, allows us to provide tailored and effective advice. We understand and support client demands during all phases of a project, ranging from rapid assessments and interactive design sessions during tender or early design stages, up to detailed evaluations during final design stages.
Innovation
As an applied research institute, we always improve and extend our knowledge, tools, and models to enable our state-of-the-art specialist advice to our clients for both the challenges of today and those of tomorrow. In particular, we focus our research surrounding coastline dynamics on:
- Improving our system understanding using both local and global data such as remote sensing data (e.g., satellite imagery-derived data), especially useful for data-scarce environments
- Nature-based solutions that employ natural resources and dynamics to fulfil functional requirements of land reclamations and beaches
- The effects of climate change hazards on beach design and land reclamations, both for existing and new developments
- Increasing model prediction accuracy and applicability to complex coastlines through novel numerical model development (such as the highly flexible coastline dynamics model ‘ShorelineS’) and seamless modelling of physical processes and multi-scale interaction (such as coupling with the aeolian sediment transport model AeoLIS)
- Understanding and quantifying uncertainty ranges by adopting probabilistic techniques into complex numerical modelling studies, providing the ability for risk-informed decision-making to our clients
- Integrated solutions to fulfil multiple societal needs and system services in term of flood risk reduction, economic activities, recreation, and nature conservation by increasing knowledge over multi-disciplinary interaction aspects
- Interactive visualisation and modelling techniques to improve dialogue and interactivity with clients and their stakeholders, in all different phases of a project
