Coastal Vulnerability Assessment and Response Strategies of Fujian Delta Based on InVEST Model

Climate change and urbanization have made coastal areas significantly vulnerable in the face of natural disasters. The coastal vulnerability module of the integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs model is used to evaluate the vulnerability and population risk along the coastline of the Fujian Delta. Xiamen City, with a typical high risk, is selected for further simulation on the city scale. This research improves the index selection from three aspects, namely, geographical, climate-forced and socio-economic, and improves the evaluation method by reflecting the fuzzy uncertainty of index weight based on the fuzzy theory. It elaborates the coastal vulnerability evaluation on the city scale, and analyzes the coastal vulnerability of Xiamen under three scenarios of current habitat, non-habitat and habitat restoration. The results show that: 1) 44.6% of the coastline in the Fujian Delta is highly vulnerable, among which the coastal vulnerability and population risk of Xiamen are particularly prominent; 2) Natural habitats play an important role in improving the disaster prevention resilience along the coastline. The lack of natural habitats will increase the proportion of highly vulnerable coastline in Xiamen by 34.7%; 3) The restoration of coastal habitats can promote the shoreline resilience to a certain extent. However, it is difficult to meet the disaster prevention needs of high vulnerability and population risk shoreline. To protect shorelines with high risks, it is necessary to take engineering measures to assist ecological restoration. The strategies discussed to enhance coastal resilience are helpful for enhancing coastal resilience disaster prevention and ecological restoration.