All I want for Christmas is sand

The title sounds weird, I know. As a geologist, it could be a nice personal gift, but I really believe, that I won´t be the only one asking for sand. I live in a coastal area, specifically in the bay of Biscay, and year-to-year missing sand on beaches is becoming a more common problem, due to the strong storms hitting these areas during winter. But it´s not just a matter of the area, or the season, the lack of sediment in beaches is a global problem. Sea level rise is a reallity, and it is causing changes of different processes at coastal areas, increasing the erosion rate of the coast at most of the places. These erosion processes at coastal areas, of course, act on the beachy sediment, removing it or depositing at the inner parts. Which solutions should we take? How could we protect these coastal areas?

Historically, protection of coastal areas has been a common problem for engineers, and different solutions where taken. Mainly temporal solutions. Coastal areas are always related to tourism, tourism is money. All is about money, of course. So, these temporal solutions, as the name says, are just short term solutions that could be destroyed after some months of activity. The most clear example is the nourishmet of a eroded beach by dredging sand from an aquatic zone (an estuary, river, etc.) and depositing it at the beach. Once we have more sand at the beach, more useful the beach becomes for the society (in terms of tourism or accesibility of the beach).  But, how the waves and currents will be working with these sand is a completely different story, changing the morphology of the beach (slope), pushing it back to different depths, or changing the "quality" of the water due to the suspended sediment.

Is it fair to change the dynamic of the coast, of the earth in general, for our own benefits? How could affect the solutions we take locally, in another part of the ocean or coast? How could we work in order to avoid to destroy the coast? How do we have to act due to the sea level rise? Soft engineering has become a solution in many cases, as the use of seagrass fields or artifitial coral reefs. What it is clear is that we need proper solutions to protect our coast, we are running out of time, and depends who could be running out of money quite soon... a rise of few cm-s will be affecting directly to all the life around the coast.