Increasing Edge via Realignment

A useful illustration from the Dutch Deltaproof website in their section explaining managed retreat/realignment.

'Intertidal habitats and natural coastlines provide an important buffering function for flood protection. Habitats absorb and attenuate wave energy and in turn provide protection against flooding and prevent erosion, also during storm events. In addition, the intertidal areas move landward to a proportionately higher elevation as sea levels rise. Man-made flood defences form an obstacle for these natural processes to occur. These were constructed decades ago to prevent the flooding of low lying coastal and estuarine areas. While these constructions enabled the land to be developed or used for agriculture, hydro-morphological processes and functions of a water body were constrained. A fixed line of flood defence leads to narrowing of the intertidal area - a phenomenon known as coastal squeeze.'

Managed Retreat Issue 1

Managed Retreat - Issue 1

Managed Retreat - Issue 1 - the print edition launches Saturday 20th July 2013 at the Eastern Region Permaculture Gathering.

Managed Retreat is an occasional journal of the English orient - it's bioregional & geopoetic, it promotes an ecological Englishness and comes with an eastern flavour. It's about nature & culture. This is the front cover & some of the contents.

Currently available for £5 postage inc.(barter if you've got something interesting!). See the Print Edition page for order details.

Preparing for change on the coast

2011 video from Managing Coastal Change about 'an innovative scheme to recreate salt marsh'.

Managed Retreat

Along the eastern shore of Britain the line between sea and land has been sketched many times and any particular stroke we might consider now as definitive tells us more about our place in time than about the place’s place in space. Up and down the coast are fields re-claimed from the brine, drained, each one a little victory in a guerrilla campaign against the tide, fought for and barricaded in, fortified with bank and stone work. The war, of course, was actually lost millennia ago when climate change had worked its assault on the northern ice and a distant frozen fortification was undermined - releasing a tsunami across Doggerland, our Palaeolithic Atlantis, the fabled land bridge across which the first hominids had walked here. Since then the German Ocean, the North Sea, has provided our moat – a stretch of water separating the British archipelago from the continent to which it belongs.