Urban growth usually aggravates flooding problems, disrupting city life and requiring engineering works to ensure safety conditions to lower-lying city areas. Traditionally, canalization works were the preferred choice for flood mitigation. However, increased city growth limits the effectiveness of this approach due to the lack of free spaces. In addition, local canalization practices tend to transfer flooding downstream in a nonsustainable way. In the last 80 years, the town of Cittanova, in the province of Reggio Calabria, Italy, has been subjected to several flooding events related to river overflows or storm drain failures causing significant damages to mobility, households, and even to public safety. This paper focuses on the Forio Creek, which is a tributary of the Vacale River and runs through the city. The study was carried out using mathematical tools within a conceptual framework with the aim of mapping floods to prevent damage to the city and avoid future losses, thus reducing risks. MODCEL was the hydrodynamic model used to map urban floods and to support the use of the Flood Risk Index (FRI), which is a quantitative multicriteria tool relating flood levels to socioeconomic losses. Both the MODCEL and the FRI were previously available, but their combined use and the final integrated analyses carried in this paper introduce a simple and quantifiable flood risk procedure to identify present flood risks and foresee future scenarios while supporting alternative design and prioritizing flood control choices. This framework was applied to Cittanova and validated by practical observations.

The analysis of shoreline changes is very important for coastal planning and management. In territories such as Calabria (Italy), characterized by significant anthropogenic pressures and various eroded coasts, the knowledge of the shoreline changes, and the factors that influence them, is necessary for management and planning of coastal areas. In fact, shoreline position is one of the most important indicators of coastal dynamics. From this point of view recent advances in remote sensing and GIS techniques allow to estimate with great precision the shoreline changes over the years. The paper analyzes the shoreline changes near the mouth of the Sant’Agata River (Reggio Calabria, Italy), carried out through the comparison of various cartography data. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the main factors influencing the coastal dynamics in order to identify possible correlation between these factors and the shoreline changes. The analysis of these factors shows that, in this case study, the rainfall regime has a considerable influence on shoreline change. The methodology described in this paper is particularly useful for better understanding the factors that most influence the coastal balance and, therefore, is applicable to many contexts which are similar to the Sant’Agata river mouth.

During the second half of the last century, considerable anthropization processes were observed throughout most of the Italian territory. These processes have altered the equilibrium conditions of several river and coastal ecosystems, causing the destruction of numerous dune systems. This issue is particularly important in territories such as Calabria, a region in southern Italy subject to considerable anthropogenic pressures and characterized by over 700 km of coast. The aim of the paper was to evaluate the effects of anthropogenic pressures on the Calabrian dune systems, especially in regard to the triggering of coastal erosion processes. For this purpose, historical and current cartographic data, such as shapefiles, cartography, and satellite imagery, were analyzed using QGIS. This evaluation was carried out through the comparison between the current extension of the dune systems and their extensions after the Second World War, before the anthropogenic pressures. This evaluation was also carried out through the analysis of shoreline changes in coastal areas, where dune systems are currently present, and in coastal areas where dune systems have been partially or totally destroyed by anthropogenic causes, compared to the 1950s, thus excluding coastal areas without dune systems in the 1950s, and analyzing what was built in place of the destroyed dune systems. Two criteria were defined to identify the levels of destruction of the dune systems and to identify the coastal erosion processes. The analysis showed a strong correlation between the destruction of dune systems by anthropogenic causes and the triggering of coastal erosion processes.

Beach–dune system morphodynamics is probably one of the most classical coastal engineering problems. While the topic has been studied extensively and literature is plentiful of considerable research contributions, from the authors’ knowledge the subject is still challenging for coastal and environmental sciences. As a part of the Special Issue entitled “Beach–dune system morphodynamics” of this Journal, the present paper reviews traditional issues and design advances building bridges between potential risks and adaptation measures. The benefits of nature-based and hybrid solutions and the need for multidisciplinary studies and approaches to promote sustainable and resilient conservation of the coastal environment are emphasized. Considering the importance and complexity of the subject, this work cannot be fully complete. It is limited to providing a general overview and outlining some important directions intending to serve as a springboard for further research in the field of beach–dune system morphodynamics.

Urbanization increases imperviousness and reduces infiltration, retention, and evapotranspiration, frequently aggravating urban flooding due to greater runoff and higher and faster discharge peaks. Effective strategies to mitigate flood risks require a better understanding of the watershed dynamics and space to reverse the negative impacts. However, often cities do not have proper data sets to feed mathematical models that would be helpful in mapping water dynamics. Attempts to reduce flood risks have been made for decades by means of structural interventions but were frequently designed within the logic of a local scale, using limited available spaces and often merely shifting flooding downstream. Therefore, assessing urban floods requires a modeling approach capable of reflecting the watershed scale, considering interactions between hydraulic structures and urban landscape, where best practices and non-structural measures aim to improve community flood resilience through the reduction of social and financial costs in the long run. This paper proposes an integrated approach to analyze low impact development (LID) practices complemented by non-structural measures in a case study in southern Italy, supported by mathematical modeling in a strategy to overcome a context of almost no available data and limited urban open spaces.

The issue of coastal erosion currently affects most of the world’s coastal territories. This erosion is generally caused by an alteration of coastal and river dynamics both due to the action of natural factors and to the increase in anthropogenic pressure, mainly observed in the second half of the last century after the end of the Second World War. In the future, this issue may be more affected by climate change. This paper describes the shoreline evolutionary trends at different time scale along the Calabrian coasts, a region in southern Italy, in over 50 sample areas. Calabria represents an interesting case study due to its geomorphological peculiarities and due to its considerable anthropogenic pressures, which have caused extensive erosive processes. In addition, this paper analyzes the main causes of these evolutionary trends and classifies them using a quick methodology based on a shoreline variation rate of a fixed area. This is an index-based methodology and is a part of a new generally index-based coastal risk assessment methodology, developed by the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria and the Calabria Region and which is currently in progress. The main result is that the sample areas in the erosion classes prevail over those in the advancement class for very long-term, long-term and middle-term time interval while for short-term and most recent time interval the sample areas in the advancement class prevail over those in the erosion classes.