Coastal Road Resilience in Nile Delta, Egypt: A Comprehensive Multihazard Risk Assessment

The coastal region of the Nile Delta in Egypt is highly susceptible to various natural hazards and climate change, posing significant threats to its transportation infrastructure. Existing risk mapping approaches typically consider vulnerability and hazard-affecting factors but often overlook the resilience of the actual road. As such, this study presents a multihazard risk approach for assessing the resilience of the International Coastal Road (ICR), which is a major road running along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea by integrating the impacts of climate change, including coastal floods, heatwaves, and land subsidence. To achieve this, a combination of remote sensing based datasets and techniques, including Google Earth Engine, synthetic aperture radar, along with the analytic hierarchy process method, are employed to generate a comprehensive risk map for the ICR based on its resilience. The risk index maps for the four possible occurrence scenarios are created and summed to extract the most repeated section of the ICR with a very high-risk index. The resultant risk index map shows that approximately 74% of the ICR is prone to one or more hazards. Furthermore, visual field investigations confirmed the obtained results for most portions of the ICR’s susceptibility to multiple hazards.