Excerpt:
Greece Lost 250 Sq Km of Its Beaches in 30 Years Due to Climate Change..
Costas Synolakis, a preeminent authority on the impact of natural hazards, warned that Greece will see even more of its coastline being swallowed up as climate change continues to push up the sea level.
“By 2050 even, when the sea level is estimated to rise an additional 20 to 30 centimeters, the coastline at some beaches will recede by as much as 30 meters, depending on the incline of the land,” Synolakis, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Technical University of Crete and the University of Southern California, told state broadcaster ERT.
Synolakis went on to warn of the enormous financial cost of large swathes of tourism-dependent Greece’s heavily developed coastline being destroyed.
“We made a few calculations at the Academy’s research center and, according to these calculations, the cost has already reached some 2.6 billion euros a year,” he said, pointing to estimates according to which every square meter of coastline brings 10-15 euros into the local economy every year.
“This is what we have already lost, and this is also on an annual basis because erosion just keeps increasing,” he warned…
