Soaring Building Collapses in Southern Mediterranean Coasts:
Hydroclimatic Drivers & Adaptive Landscape Mitigations
- Sara S. Fouad,
- Essam Heggy,
- Oula Amrouni,
- Steffen Nijhuis,
- Abderraouf Hzami,
- Nesma Mohamed,
- Ibrahim Hindawy Saleh,
- Seifeddine Jomaa,
- Yasser Elsheshtawy,
- Udo Weilacher
Oula Amrouni
National Institute of Marine Sciences and Technologies,
Author ProfileAbderraouf Hzami
National Institute of Marine Sciences and Technology
Author ProfileNesma Mohamed
Institute of Graduate Studies and Research Alexandria University
Author ProfileIbrahim Hindawy Saleh
Institute of Graduate Studies and Research Alexandria University
Author ProfileSeifeddine Jomaa
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
Author ProfileAbstract
The low-lying, arid coastal regions of the Southern Mediterranean basin,
extending over 4600 km, face daunting sea level rise and hydroclimatic
changes due to shifting weather patterns. The impacts of the above on
coastal urban buildings and infrastructure still need to be more
qualified and understood. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated
port city representative of several coastal cities in the Southern
Mediterranean, has experienced over 280 building collapses near its
shorelines over the past two decades, with the root causes still being
investigated. We explore the decadal changes in coastal and
hydroclimatic drivers along the city's coastline using a GIS-based
multi-criteria analysis in the areas where buildings collapsed from 1974
to 2021. Our results suggest that collapses are correlated to severe
coastal erosion due to sediment imbalance caused by the decades-long
inefficient landscape and urban expansion along the historic city's
waterfront. This severe erosion, combined with sea level rise, upsurges
seawater intrusion, which raises the groundwater levels in coastal
aquifers, disrupting soil stability and accelerating corrosion in
building foundations until they collapse. We identified a coastal area
of high vulnerability with over 7,000 buildings at risk, surpassing any
other vulnerable zone in the Mediterranean Basin. We conclude that
several coastal and densely urbanized areas in the Southern
Mediterranean are at greater risk of building collapses due to similar
hydroclimatic changes. Therefore, we propose a landscape-based coastal
mitigation approach to implement adaptive transformations to curb these
risks that apply to Alexandria and other southern Mediterranean cities
facing the same challenges.15 May 2024Submitted to ESS Open Archive 16 May 2024Published in ESS Open Archive