CORAI – Coastal resilience to global change: multidimensional adaptation processes

Context and objectives

In the face of climate change, the strategy for decades consisted primarily in prioritising mitigation, by seeking to limit the effects of climate change through tackling its causes. Over the past ten years, however, the need for adaptation has taken on a prominent place on the international and national political stage. A growing body of research and government reports has shown that responses to global change — of which climate change is one component — must now address both mitigation and adaptation.

Yet, despite their inclusion in numerous reports (IPCC, COP, international agreements), the notions of adaptation and resilience remain poorly defined and still little applied. Adaptation strategies often remain piecemeal and confined to the scale of a city, a neighbourhood, or a socio-ecosystem, and/or focused on a particular hazard, making it difficult to account for systemic risks. Research questioning the adaptation and resilience of territories in a context of global change — of a changing, uncertain environment, of compound risks and interacting scales — remains rare.

The CORAI project therefore aims to fill this gap. It will produce coherent scientific and operational responses to the specific adaptation and resilience challenges facing French coastal zones (mainland France and Réunion Island) confronted with global change: these territories are attractive and often densely populated; they are characterised by a concentration of multiple terrestrial and maritime activities, by the presence of major cities and essential infrastructure — port infrastructure in particular — but also by unique social ecosystems. We therefore propose a systemic, multidimensional, and multi-scale approach that goes beyond a sectoral approach to risk and will provide tools (TRL 4–7) capable of supporting different forms of adaptation.

For each French coastal region (Mediterranean, North Atlantic, the Channel, and the Indian Ocean), two pilot territories will be selected to co-construct knowledge, test the tools (indicators and a decision-support portal), and investigate the representations and emotions of the target stakeholders — the latter remaining little explored, even though they strongly influence the social acceptability of planning and adaptation strategies.

We propose an integrated research approach that combines the expertise of field stakeholders with the scientific and methodological insights of the humanities and social sciences, the Earth and marine sciences, and geomatics. This inter- and transdisciplinarity is a key innovation of the project.