Rosetta Promontory, Egypt has been suffering from a continuous erosion problem. The dramatic retreatment was observed during the last century. It is basically due to the construction of Aswan High Dam in 1964, which reduced the flow and sediment discharges. In this paper, four Landsat images (two Thematic Mapper and two Enhanced Thematic Mapper) covering the period from 1984 to 2014 were used. These Landsat images were radio-metrically and geometrically corrected, and then, multi-temporal post-classification analysis was performed to detect land cover changes, extracting shoreline positions to estimate shoreline change rates of the Nile delta coast around Rosetta Promontory. This method provides a viable means for examining long-term shoreline changes. Four categories, including seawater, developed (agriculture and urban), sabkhas (salt-flat), and undeveloped areas, were selected to evaluate their temporal changes by comparing the four selected images. Supervised classification technique was used with support vector machine algorithm to detect temporal changes. The overall accuracy assessment of this method ranged from 97% to 100%. In addition, the shoreline was extracted by applying two different techniques. The first method is based on a histogram threshold of Band 5, and the other uses the combination of histogram threshold of Band 5 and two band ratios (Band 2/Band 4 and Band 2/Band 5). For land cover change detection from 1984 to 2014, it was found that the developed area that increased by 9% although the land in the study area has been contracted by 1.6% due to coastal erosion. The shoreline retreat rate has decreased more than 70% from 1984 to 2014. Nevertheless, it still suffers from significant erosion with a maximum rate of 37 m/year. In comparison to ground survey and different remote sensing techniques, the established trend of shoreline change extracted using histogram threshold was found to be closely consistent with these studies rather than combining band ratio with histogram threshold.

Socio-economic and environmental issues for the coastal zone worldwide are identified and examined, as well as the corresponding issues in Egypt. Coastal zones have been greatly exploited by man for establishment and growth of industry, resource extraction, tourism and urbanization, which have led to a multitude of negative environmental impacts such as accelerated erosion, deposition, eutrophication, destruction of marine life and overall decrease of bio-diversity. As coastal zone resources share common characteristics, they have to be managed integrally not in isolated way.This work surveyed the coastal zone issues and the proposed solutions in many countries. For this purpose, a classification for these issues is discussed illustrating various solution executed for each case. Moreover, Integrated coastal zone management and its extension around the world is surveyed.It is clear from the study that the successful finger-print in the coastal zone associated with applying the integrated coastal zone management strategies. Although many initiatives were adopted before to apply the integrated coastal zone management in Egypt, unfortunately, these trials were disappointing in its outcomes due to using top-down approach, lack of capacity, lack of stakeholder involvement, lack of integration, and lack of institutional arrangement for coastal management