Environment

Chile’s Coastal Erosion Could Erase 10 Beaches within 10 Years

Reuters

10:56 JST, August 14, 2025

RENACA, Chile (Reuters) — Chile’s central and southern coastlines are facing erosion that could cause at least 10 beaches to disappear within a decade, according to a team of scientists in the South American country, which stretches for several thousand kilometers along the Pacific Ocean.

Reuters
A road cut off by a landslide on a hill near the ocean’s shore. Photos were taken in Puerto Saavedra, Chile, on May 12.

“It will be very difficult for these beaches to survive the next 10 years,” said Carolina Martinez, director of the Coastal Observatory at Universidad Catolica, in an interview last month on the Renaca beach near the popular coastal city of Vina del Mar.

Her team has tracked erosion on 67 beaches, finding that 86% are steadily shrinking — even during spring and summer, when they typically recover.

Ten in particular, which already had high erosion in 2023, have continued to rapidly lose ground, with rates now about twice as high.

The causes are both natural and human-made, Martinez said.

She pointed to intense and increasingly frequent swells driven by climate change, along with rising sea levels, sudden downpours and heat waves, as key factors. Unchecked urbanization and the degradation of river basins that supply sand to the coast have also contributed.

In Puerto Saavedra, in the southern region of Araucania, storm surges have carved sinkholes into roads and cliffs, cutting off access to some communities. The saltwater is damaging forests, too.

“We’re seeing cliffs and sandy shores retreating rapidly,” Martinez said.

Reuters
Signs reading ‘Machines Working’ and ‘Danger, Do Not Enter’ are seen near a part of the beach where wave seawall is being built, in Chile, on July 7.

Reuters
A reflection shows people eating at a restaurant near the ocean’s shore, in Chile, on July 7.

Some local businesses in popular tourist towns are already feeling the impact. “Last year was brutal … the beach disappeared,” said Maria Harris, who owns a beachfront restaurant in Valparaiso. “There was no space between us and the sea.”

Despite the risks, construction continues along the coastline, often near wetlands and dunes. Martinez warned that the impacts go beyond the environment.

“We’re transferring the cost of these disasters to people — fishermen, coastal communities and the tourism sector,” she said.