When Socio-Economic Plans Exacerbate Vulnerability to Physical Coastal Processes on the South East Coast of India

ABSTRACT Muthusankar, G.; Proisy, C.; Balasubramanian, D.; Bautes, N.; Bhalla, R S.; Mathevet, R.; Ricout, A.; Senthil Babu, D., and Vasudevan, S., 2018. When socio-economic plans exacerbate vulnerability to physical coastal processes on the south east coast of India. In: Shim, J.-S.; Chun, I., and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 1446–1450. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Industrial and urban development along the coast may exacerbate the changes induced by oceano-climatic processes to such an extent that the coast becomes uninhabitable. This paper presents a baseline study carried out on the 360 km-long Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu's (TN) Bay of Bengal coast, Southeast India. About 30% of the 72 million inhabitants of the state of TN live in low-lying coastal areas within a variety of ecosystems such as sandy beaches and dunes, wetlands, mudflats and mangroves. E...