The protective benefits of tsunami mitigation parks and ramifications for their strategic design

Hybrid approaches to mitigating tsunami risk combine vegetation (green element) with traditional engineering components (grey elements) to maximize protection and other benefits. While hybrid approaches like tsunami mitigation parks are being built worldwide, our understanding of the protective benefits they provide and our ability to optimally design these parks are limited. Here, the authors show that the main protective benefit of tsunami mitigation parks is the reflection of wave energy.

Apart from the protective benefits of the park, the authors highlight that tsunami mitigation parks could locally increase tsunami risk, depending on the placement and arrangement of the hills. Hills could elevate potential damage in the immediate vicinity of the hills where flow speeds increase compared to a planar beach, suggesting the need to include a buffer zone behind the hills into the strategic park design.