July 27, 2009 9:32 9.75in x 6.5in b684-ch33 FA Chapter 33 Socioeconomic and Environmental Risk in Coastal and Ocean Engineering Miguel A. Losada ∗ , Asunci´ on Baquerizo † , Miguel Ortega-S´ anchez ‡ and Juan M. Santiago § Grupo de Din´amica de Flujos Ambientales CEAMA - University of Granada, Avda. del Mediterr´ aneo s/n 18006 Granada, Spain ∗ mlosada@ugr.es † abaqueri@ugr.es ‡ miguelos@ugr.es § santi@ugr.es Elena S´ anchez-Badorrey Departamento de Mec´anica de las Estructuras e Ingenier´ ıa Hidr´ aulica University of Granada, Granada, Spain elenasb@ugr.es It is broadly admitted socioeconomic progress is exhausting the energy, water, and coastal zone resources. To overcome this trend, a more serious and rigorous slogan must drive the progress today: (1) socioeconomic and environmental progress must be concomitant, (2) use of basic resources must be minimized, and (3) opera- tionality and safety of the human works must be maximized. These new demands ask for a new coastal and ocean engineering philosophy, regarding the socioeco- nomic and environmental impact of the human intervention during its useful life. However, coastal and ocean engineering must deal with the environmental events and their random nature. Thus, the response to the problem has to include the associated uncertainty, among others, to the occurrence of the atmospheric and maritime agents and to the response of the systems. In this chapter, a summary of some of the new design principles and tools that can help to match the society demands are presented. Based on risk analysis and decision theory, the problem of an integrated coastal and harbor management is formulated. The new approach is applied to evaluate the probability distribution of the coastline in V years in a stretch of coast in the south of Spain. Next, the * Corresponding author. 923