Assessment of coastal changes in Ashairej promontory: Unraveling anthropogenic influences in Kuwait bay

For almost 40 years, the Ashairej area in Kuwait Bay has been affected by anthropogenic alterations caused by releasing untreated sewage and industrial waste. Related contaminants have affected the Bay’s Ocean currents, leading to unnatural sedimentation cycles that have changed the promontory’s shape over time. Using both remote sensing and fieldwork, this paper showcases the development of a land-use map for the promontory using change-over-time. Specifically, land use and land cover changes are identified through: (i) outlining changes in Ashairej promontory from 1985 to 2023, (ii) evaluating bay currents’ standard circulation patterns, and (iii) determining decay and sedimentation rates along the Ashairej coast. The overarching goal rests in laying the foundation for creating the first basic geographic information systems database for the Ashairej promontory, capable of analyzing temporal coastal anthropogeomorphological changes that can then potentially be generalized for, and extended to, Kuwait’s other rapidly expanding coastal areas. The results can help guide officials in efforts to mitigate the study area’s human encroachment and give specialists and decision-makers refined and easy-to-understand assessment techniques which can hopefully be applied to future protection efforts of Kuwait’s fragile coastal/near-coastal ecosystems.