A Review of Climate Adaptation Impacts and Strategies in Coastal Communities: From Agent-Based Modeling towards a System of Systems Approach

Abstract

Global warming and climate variations are expected to alter hydrologic conditions and exacerbate flooding, primarily through increasingly frequent and intense storm events and sea-level rise. The interactions between coastlines and their inhabitants around the world are highly diverse, making them challenging to model due to the non-homogeneous, nonlinear, and complex nature of human decision-making. Agent-based modeling has proven valuable in various fields, enabling researchers to explore various social phenomena and emergent patterns under different institutional frameworks, including climate change scenarios and policy decisions, particularly at local scales. This approach is particularly useful in providing insights into possible outcomes and feedback resulting from the convergence of individual- and community-level adaptation decisions, and it has increasingly been used to model coastal systems. However, there are a limited number of studies that examine the effects of climate adaptation decisions on coastal tourism systems. This paper aims to address this gap by first providing an overview of the current state of agent-based modeling literature that explores coastal community adaptation responses to climate change. Subsequently, the paper argues for the application of these methods to simulate the effects of adaptation on coastal tourism dynamics. To better capture the interactions within subsystems and potential redistributed effects inherent in multi-scale and multi-stakeholder decision-making processes within these systems, we propose integrating agent-based modeling with a novel system of socio-environmental systems (SoSES) approach. This integration aims to assist city planners, policymakers, stakeholders, and attraction managers in effectively assessing adaptation options to safeguard their communities from the multifaceted impacts of climate change.

Simulation of Flood-Induced Human Migration at the Municipal Scale: A Stochastic Agent-Based Model of Relocation Response to Coastal Flooding

“…The current framework assumes that migration patterns in the study area follow the estimations provided by HJCHS as well as our suggested heuristic decision rules. Nonetheless, it is worth acknowledging that ABM frequently involves simplifications and assumptions about intricate social and ecological processes, potentially leading to an oversimplification of real-world dynamics and constraining the model's precision [86]. The structural model choices made regarding the representation of human behavior significantly impact the credibility and validity of modeling insights.…”

Climate Change Adaptation Strategies for Coastal Resilience: A Stakeholder Surveys

“…Furthermore, various adaptation measures for climate change in coastal areas have been explored in the literature, including coastal defense [6][7][8], coastal management [9,10], and water management [11][12][13][14]. The literature emphasizes the importance of context-specific approaches to coastal adaptation [15] and provides valuable guidance for policymakers and practitioners.…”