Valuing the shoreline: Guide for socio-economic analysis

This guideline gives an overview on how to make socio-economic evaluations of coastal areas affected by erosion and flooding. The use of such an evaluation gives valuable information and insight into the function, needs, effects and costs for handling, - or not handling - the erosion problems. The guideline could be used in order to make priorities between areas that need attention due to threatened shorelines and/or which actions would be most efficient and effective to apply. Management of erosion and flood protection must be long term and take into account all possible factors and impacts of projects (e.g. income sources from tourism, possibility for industrial use, such as fishing and transportation as well as environmental values). This guideline is meant for people working at county administrations, municipalities, governmental authorities, private landowners, etc., dealing with or affected by coastal erosion issues. The guideline can also be used when procuring consulting services. The guideline is intended for those who are not experts in the field of coastal erosion or in the use of socio-economic analyses. The main purpose is to increase the knowledge on how to evaluate the shorelines and establish a sustainable coastal management. The guideline is written in an easy to read format and gives an overview of socio-economic evaluation methods. It also explains the benefit of such evaluations and gives answers to why land areas should be evaluated. An overview of Why and When socio-economic assessments should be performed is given in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 describes How socio-economic assessments could be performed. The processes of and the main steps in a project appraisal is explained including hazard and risk analysis, identification of effects, how to select an appropriate analysis model and presentation of the results. In Chapter 4, lessons learned by economic analyses of a number of cases are illustrated and some general remarks are given. Different economic analysis models are described in Appendix 1. A guide to select an economic evaluation method is presented in Appendix 2. A summary and lessons learned by each of the case studies are compiled in Appendix 3. Literature for further studies is given in Appendix 4.Messin