Danish Coastal Authority is part of the Building with Nature Interreg project
The Danish Coastal Authority (DCA) is part of the interregional EU-project ‘Building with Nature’ together with partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Belgium. The purpose of the project is to investigate how natural forces are used to build, construct or maintain coastal protection schemes.
The overall objective is to make coasts and catchments of the North Sea Region more adaptable and resilient to the effects of climate change. The project will focus on cost-efficient coastal protection schemes like sand nourishment and coastal dunes as a natural protection of the hinterland for erosion and flooding. BwN uses state-of-the-art methods for transnational analysis of seven coastal resilient laboratories. This will generate improved knowledge for municipalities and citizens to handle coastal erosion under recent and future climate conditions by implementing cost-efficient coastal protection schemes. On the basis of this improved designs and business cases will be developed, which can be used by citizens, engineers and policymakers to optimize coastal protection schemes. This allows well-documented BwN solutions to be incorporated into national policy and investment programmes in the respective countries.
DCA’s research areas
DCA encompasses seven research areas within this project. The purpose of doing research within these areas is to develop design guidelines for sand nourishments in Denmark. This is obtained by analysing coastal dynamics and different nourishment designs in both national and international perspectives. The analysis will be carried out in corporation with the other countries in order to establish synergy and knowledge transfer between the BwN partners. Handling of erosion problems by implementing sand transport reducing methods will be investigated through analysis of wind-driven (aeolian) sand transport fluxes at selected study areas. Furthermore, a sediment budget of the Wadden Sea will be calculated in corporation with Schleswig-Holstein for investigating whether the sedimentation rate of the Wadden Sea is able to keep up with relative sea level rise in the region. The resulting sediment budget can be used as a basis for managing the Wadden Sea and securing the area to future climate conditions by improving strength of seadikes.
Improved knowledge will generate better guidance and cost-effective projects
DCA expects that this InterReg project will benefit the guidance of coastal protection projects to become more adapted to climate change trough transnational research with the involved partners. With improved knowledge the coastal protection will be optimised and become more cost-effective. The gained knowledge from this project will be available for citizens, municipalities and engineers, for example as national guidelines for sand nourishment strategies.
Activities in the project
The exchange of experiences and cooperation takes place continuously throughout the life of the project. This means that the Danish Coastal Authority participates 2-4 times a year in international meetings with the other partners in the project. In connection with these meetings, the project group is usually on a fieldtrip to see the host’s living laboratories. The Danish Coastal Authority has until now hosted a coordination meeting where all partners in the project participated and also for a workpackages meeting where the partners working on the same issues as the Danish Coastal Authority participated.
In March 2017, the Danish Coastal Authority hosted the project´s coordination meeting. Partners from Scotland, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Norway and Holland were participating. During the meeting, the Danish coastal Authority arranged a field trip to the Danish living coastal laboratory at Krogen for at great deal of interest in the project´s coastal group. In attention to the project´s partners who work with natural catchment laboratories, the trip also visited Holstebro, where the partners were presented to Storeåen and the flooding issues experienced in connection with Storeåen. All partners received the information folder, where they could read a littel about the two places visited. This folder can be found below.
In June 2018 the Danish Coastal Authority was in charge of a workpackage meeting. In connection with this meeting there were visits from Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The field trip once again went to the west coast of Jutland, this time down to the living laboratory at Skodbjerge and ending on Gjellerodde north of Lemvig. In connection to the field trip a description of the visits sites was presented. It can be found under files. It is possible to follow the tour on the map below, viewing pictures from all the visited areas. There are historical pictures added by the Danish Coastal Authority and new pictures taken by the participants on the fieldtrip.
In December 2018, the Danish Coastal Authority has completed a national analysis for Skodbjerge "Shoreface nourishment effects". The analysis is the first major subproject and will be included in the joint co-analyzes in 2019 together with the other partners' national analyzes.
You will find the analysis in English below.
Dokumenter
The structure and context in the Building with Nature project
The project will run over a 4-year period from 2016-2020 and the EU finances 50 % of the Danish part of the project.
Read more about the Building with Nature project on northsearegion.eu
The Building with Nature project is a combination between six different Work Packages:
- Work Package 1 – Project management
- Work Package 2 – Communication activities
- Work Package 3 – Resilient coastal laboratories
- Work Package 4 – Natural catchment laboratories
- Work Package 5 – Upscale, business case and opportunity mapping
- Work Package 6 – Upscale, practice, policy and capacity building