More and more coasts are suffering from “beach mortality”, especially in Spain. For example, Platja d’Aro on the Costa Brava has been getting ‘smaller, smaller and smaller’ for decades, as local restaurant owner Aldo puts it. There are no official figures.
Experts believe that one reason for this is that coastlines are built up to the beach. Protective dunes often no longer exist. On a natural coastline, the beach would simply slowly migrate inland – which is not possible if it were built close to the sea.
Only 50 instead of 150 meters wide
Josep, 48, has tears in his eyes as he looks down from the promenade at Platja d’Aro beach in northern Spain. “As a child I used to play and bathe here; the beach was twice as wide then,” says the teacher. The newspaper ‘La Vanguardia’ recently reported that Platja Gran, the ‘big beach’, which is now an average of 50 metres wide, was three times as wide in the 1980s.
“Beaches that have remained natural can easily adapt to climate change, because they can retreat and rise as sea levels rise,” says Francesca Ribas of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. But if the beach can’t move because of all the concrete, it will disappear.
Beaches are also disappearing in other coastal areas, such as California and Florida, Turkey, Brazil and the Gold Coast in Australia. One factor is climate change.
Barcelona: 30,000 cubic meters of sand washed away
Under conditions characterized by climate change and sea level rise, “half of the world’s sandy beaches could disappear by the end of the century,” according to a study presented in the journal Nature Climate Change. The city of Barcelona estimates that 30,000 cubic meters of sand are washed away each year.
“One of the most striking cases is Montgat, where the beach has lost 90 percent of its sand,” says environmental organization Greenpeace. Since July 2023 alone, the total area of the beach there has decreased from 25,000 to 6,400 square meters, according to official information.
Barely any room for lifeguard chairs
In the spring, the situation was so bad after a heavy storm that the city of Barcelona even considered canceling the summer season. “We almost didn’t even have the space to put a lifeguard chair,” said councillor Tania González, responsible for the environment, to the newspaper “El Periódico”.
Beach bars closed
In the meantime, there was a slight improvement. The beach, which was about 50 meters wide ten years ago and had almost completely disappeared at the beginning of this year, is now at least a two-meter thin strip again. For mayor Andreu Absil, this is no consolation: “We had to close all the beach bars.”
Coastal erosion has alarming consequences. Tourism is one of the main sources of income in almost all of Spain and also in Catalonia. And that is strongly dependent on the beaches. That is why more and more people are working to preserve the beaches.
But what solutions are there? Ribas sees only one real way out: “We have to give back to the sea what we have stolen from it.” The magic word is renaturation.
Source: Krone
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