New research by doctoral student Kimberly Schoemaker explores beach renourishment and its implications for climate-vulnerable coastal communities

Credit: Felix Mizioznikov - stock.adobe.com

Doctoral student Kimberly Schoemaker has recently published new research in the journal Antipode about the common coastal engineering practice of beach renourishment and its implications for climate-vulnerable coastal communities.

Titled ‘Sand-Hungry: Accumulations, Erosions, and the Self-Feeding Logic of Beach Renourishment,’ the article takes a critical stance, arguing that renourishment, the practice of dredging sand to widen the beachscape and combat erosion, in fact exacerbates coastal erosion whilst at the same time incentivising continued property development along a vulnerable shoreline, in this way compelling its own ‘systemic restoration’ (thinking with Marx). This paper issues a warning, that its author hopes other scholars will take up, that in the name of climate adaptation, infrastructural solutions are being deployed, elevated, and legitimized that are in fact environmentally-harmful and socially-erosive.

Read the article in full