IGCSE Geography / Coastal environments

Soft engineering and shoreline management plans

Edexcel International GCSE Geography (4GE1), chapter 2: Coastal environments, specification point 2.3c, 2.S5. Part of the full course.

Read the revision notes · IGCSE Geography past papers

Soft engineering works with natural coastal processes, while shoreline management plans (SMPs) choose how to manage each stretch of coast. Knowing the methods and policies helps you explain why different parts of a coast are protected in different ways.

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
• Case study: coastal management in The Gambia
• Case study: coastal management in Sri Lanka
• Case study: coastal management in the UK
• Coastal fieldwork: collecting the data
• Coastal fieldwork: results, conclusions and evaluation