The protective benefits of tsunami mitigation parks and ramifications for their strategic design
| Autor: | Miho Mazereeuw, Simone Marras, Adrian F. Santiago Tate, Brent Lunghino, Jenny Suckale, Abdul Muhari, Francis X. Giraldo |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Buffer zone
Disaster Planning Forests Sustainability Science Natural (archaeology) coastal forests Partial reflection mitigation parks Risk management nature-based solutions Shore green belts geography Multidisciplinary geography.geographical_feature_category business.industry Environmental resource management Vegetation Models Theoretical Current (stream) Strategic design Tsunamis Physical Sciences Environmental science tsunami risk mitigation business |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | Significance Hybrid approaches to mitigating tsunami risk combine vegetation (green element) with traditional engineering components (gray elements) to maximize protection and other benefits. While hybrid approaches like tsunami mitigation parks are being built worldwide, our understanding of the protective benefits they provide and our ability to optimally design these parks are limited. Here, we show that the main protective benefit of tsunami mitigation parks is the reflection of wave energy. Reflection can be maximized through strategic design of the park’s hillscape, at least for tsunami amplitudes that are comparable to the hill height. Apart from the protective benefits of the park, we highlight that tsunami mitigation parks could locally increase tsunami risk, depending on the placement and arrangement of the hills. Nature-based solutions are becoming an increasingly important component of sustainable coastal risk management. For particularly destructive hazards like tsunamis, natural elements like vegetation are often combined with designed elements like seawalls or dams to augment the protective benefits of each component. One example of this kind of hybrid approach is the so-called tsunami mitigation park, which combines a designed hillscape with vegetation. Despite the increasing popularity of tsunami mitigation parks, the protective benefits they provide are poorly understood and incompletely quantified. As a consequence of this lack of understanding, current designs might not maximize the protective benefits of tsunami mitigation parks. Here, we numerically model the interactions between a single row of hills with an incoming tsunami to identify the mechanisms through which the park protects the coast. We initialize the tsunami as an N wave that propagates to shore and impacts the coast directly. We find that partial reflection of the incoming wave is the most important mechanism by which hills reduce the kinetic energy that propagates onshore. The protective benefit of tsunami mitigation parks is thus comparable to that of a small wall, at least for tsunamis with amplitudes that are comparable to the hill height. We also show that hills could elevate potential damage in the immediate vicinity of the hills where flow speeds increase compared to a planar beach, suggesting the need to include a buffer zone behind the hills into a strategic park design. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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