Beach nourishment is a soft engineering intervention that supplies sand to the shore, to increase the beach recreational area and to decrease coastal vulnerability to erosion. This study presents the preliminary evaluation of nourishment works performed at the high-energy wave-dominated Portuguese coast. The shoreline was adopted as a proxy to study beach evolution in response to nourishment and to wave forcing. To achieve this aim, images collected by a video monitoring system were used. A nourishment calendar was drawn up based on video screening, highlighting the different zones and phases where the works took place. Over the six-month monitoring period, a total amount of 25 video-derived shorelines were detected by both manual and automated procedures on video imagery. Nourishment works, realized in summer, enlarged the emerged beach extension by about 90 m on average. During winter, the shoreline retreated about 50 m due to wave forcing. Spatial analysis showed that the northern beach sector was more vulnerable and subject to erosion, as it is the downdrift side of the groin.

Coastal areas are home to more than 2 billion people around the globe and, as such, are especially vulnerable to climate change consequences. Climate change adaptation has proven to be more effective on a local scale, contributing to a bottom-up approach to the problems related to the changing climate. Portugal has approximately 2000 km of coastline, with 75% of the population living along the coast. Therefore, this research had the main objective of understanding adaptation processes at a local scale, using Portuguese coastal municipalities as a case study. To achieve this goal, document analysis and a questionnaire to coastal municipalities were applied, and the existence of measures rooted in nature-based solutions, green infrastructures, and community-based adaptation was adopted as an indicator. The main conclusion from this research is that 87% of the municipalities that answered the questionnaire have climate change adaptation strategies implemented or in development. Moreover, it was possible to conclude that 90% of the municipalities are familiar with the concept of nature-based solutions and all the municipalities with adaptation strategies include green infrastructure. However, it was also possible to infer that community-based adaptation is a concept that most municipalities do not know about or undervalue.

Coastal areas are densely populated areas, and they have been experiencing increasing pressures as a consequence of population growth, but also because of climate change aggravation. For this reason, hazard, vulnerability, and risk indexes have been becoming more recurrent, especially to study and analyze low-lying coastal areas. This study presents an analysis on wave overtopping and coastal flooding, using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) multicriteria methodology, in Costa da Caparica (Portugal). The definition of the different criteria, as well as their respective weighting for the overall problem and index calculation, was carried out with the help of experts in the subject. By following this methodology, and by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), hazard, vulnerability, and risk indexes were obtained. The most hazardous areas are located closest to the sea, where the elevation is the lowest, whereas the most vulnerable areas are in neighborhoods with specific socioeconomic characteristics (high urban and economic density). Overall, around 30% of the study area displays moderate to very high risk regarding the occurrence of overtopping and flooding events. The results of this study will be helpful in decision-making processes in matters of coastal zone management and monitoring.