IGCSE Geography / Coastal environments

Case study: coastal management in Sri Lanka

Edexcel International GCSE Geography (4GE1), chapter 2: Coastal environments, specification point CS2, 2.3c, 2.3b. Part of the full course.

Read the revision notes · IGCSE Geography past papers

Sri Lanka is an emerging country with a long coastline affected by erosion and flooding. The 2004 tsunami showed how reefs can reduce wave energy, shaping later coastal planning, ecosystem protection and engineering.

More lessons in Coastal environments

• Waves and coastal erosion
• Longshore drift and coastal deposition
• Weathering and mass movement on the coast
• Headlands, bays, cliffs and wave-cut platforms
• Caves, arches, stacks and stumps
• Beaches, spits and bars
• Geology and the shape of the coast
• Vegetation, people and sea-level change
• Coastal ecosystems: coral reefs and mangroves
• Coastal ecosystems: sand dunes and salt marshes
• Inside one coastal ecosystem: the Sundarbans mangrove
• Coastal ecosystems under threat
• Case study: managing the mangrove
• Conflicts at the coast
• Why coasts flood
• Predicting and preventing coastal flooding
• Hard engineering at the coast
• Soft engineering and shoreline management plans
• Case study: coastal management in The Gambia
• Case study: coastal management in the UK
• Coastal fieldwork: collecting the data
• Coastal fieldwork: results, conclusions and evaluation