Meeting papers

Our foreshores are at the front line of climate change with expected climate change impacts such
as sea level rise and increased storm intensity and frequency already being felt. Naturally
vegetated foreshores play a vital role in sustaining our coasts and protecting foreshore
communities as sea levels rise and erosion areas expand landward.


Noosa Coastal Hazards Adaptation Plan 2021
The Noosa Coastal Hazards Adaptation Plan 2021 identifies and maps Noosa’s potential coastal
hazards risks, including sea level rise, coastal erosion and storm tide inundation for three future
timestamps: 2040, 2070 and 2100. Virtually all the land in the EBFRs is identified as erosion prone,
and the beach and some frontal dunes and coastal creeks are identified as vulnerable to storm tide
inundation during a major storm event.


As outlined in Section 4.4 of this Plan, cCommunity consultation for the Noosa CHAP strongly
identified nature-based solutions as the preferred response to climate change impacts. Many in the
community consider that a nature-based approach will best keep the natural look and feel and
safeguard the natural environment, while mitigating coastal hazard impacts. Building the health
and natural stability of the natural foreshores and vegetated dunes, and maintaining natural coastal
processes of erosion and accretion, are central to this approach.

The EBFRMP implements this aspect of the NoosaOOSA CHAP for the Eastern Beaches. The
CHAP implementation program lists and prioritises actions and tasks associated with the CHAP’s
five-year plan and adaptation pathway response for each locality. The Eastern Beaches Foreshore
Reserves Management Plan has been identified as an ‘Extreme’ priority addressing risks identified
as ‘Very High’ through the CHAP process. Other aspects of the Noosa CHAP are implemented
under other plans and programs.



Coastal hazards monitoring
As part of its strategy to manage climate change impacts along the coastline, Council developed a
long-term Coastal Monitoring Plan in 2022 which sets out annual monitoring activities to:

  1. Better inform coastal management measures;
  2. Identify key areas requiring future management; and,
  3. Provide data for future coastal hazard studies.



This work responds to a key message received from the community during the development of the
Council’s endorsed Coastal Hazards Adaptation Plan (CHAP): that localised data collection and
monitoring of the coastal system should be prioritised in order to better understand and model the
impact of coastal hazards driven by climate change. This data will inform future climate change
mitigation actions and provide feedback on the outcomes of current and future management.



The monitoring plan includes a range of data collection methods including remote sensing
techniques to capture shoreline position, beach levels, beach volume, seafloor levels, vegetation
extent and density, seafloor sediment volumes, and the movement of creek outlets. The data
collection methods include upper beach surveying, photogrammetry and LiDAR topography from
drones, fixed cameras, CoastSnap citizen science sites, water-based surveys using single beam
Eastern Beaches Foreshore Reserves Management Plan 2023                                     Page 27


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