Institute of River and Coastal Engineering

Coastal areas play an important role as places of settlement, trade and industry. World-wide more than around 100 million people worldwide live in flood-prone or potentially flood-prone areas. Without coastal protection and technical and administrative coastal protection measures, large parts of coastal areas would be regularly flooded and thus not or hardly useable. This is particularly evident, for example, in the low-lying marsh areas of northern Germany, which would be regularly flooded without coastal protection and also obvious for an Island like Taiwan where the safety of all activities at the coast depend on an effective coastal protection. Taiwan is located in the subtropical zone and is always threatened by typhoons that cause enormous losses of the human life and property every year especially in coastal areas.
Changing climate influences the processes taking place in coastal zone and has an impact on current and future coastal protection. Hydrometeorological loads on coastal areas and coastal protection structures will increase. In order to ensure future settlement and trade activities in these areas and to protect the coasts from the effects of climate change, it is necessary to rethink coastal protection strategies and measures. The focus here is on sustainable nature-based a strategies and measures.

The aim of the project is to create a digital collaborative learning environment in which students of TUHH and NCKU collaborate on challenges of sustainable nature-based coastal protection in times of a changing climate. In this way, students not only broaden their professional horizon by learning about processes in coastal areas, coastal protection (in their local coastal environment but also in the respective foreign coastal environments) and the impact of the climate change on the coastal protection, but also the students broaden their human horizon by collaborating with students from a different cultural background. In this way they train their communicative and social skills.
The lecturers also benefit from the development and implementation of the learning module. They gain insight into the teaching activities and teaching methods of the other partner institution and thus also train their communicative, social and also didactic skills.

Representatives of TUHH (Institute of River and Coastal Engineering) and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU, Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering) are working together to provide Taiwanese and German students from the field of coastal engineering with a deeper understanding of the following topics:

• Fundamentals and findings on climate change and climate change related impacts on regional wind regimes and water cycles
• Knowledge of hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes in coastal zone
• Knowledge of the impacts of climate change on coastal hydrodynamics and Morphodynamic processes
• Sustainable nature-based approaches of coastal protection in the context of classical coastal protection measures

 This links leads you to the SeaPiac Learning Arrangement on the HOOU-Platform.

In order to achieve the goals set for SeaPiac, 4 work packages (WP) will be defined for the project (Table 1.) Within the framework of WP1, the basic conceptual design of the SeaPiaC learning module will be carried out. Based on the conceptual design, WP2 deals with the development and revision of specific learning contents and learning materials as well as the set-up of the SeaPiaC online learning environment. The developed learning module will be tested in a practical implementation (AP3). After the implementation, the learning module is evaluated by the participants. In addition, user statistics are compiled and evaluated. The overall WP4 serves to document the work and findings within the project and to publish the learning module in an effective way.

• Institute of River and Coastal Engineering, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Fröhle
• M.Sc. Angelika Gruhn
• Institute of Ocean Technology and Marine Affairs, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan
• Prof. Dong-Jiing Doong