Abstract
For 400 years the 287-hectare (about 710-acre) Abbotts Hall Farm, situated on the United Kingdom’s East Anglian coast, had been protected by a 4-kilometer-long (2.5-mile) seawall. By 2002, flooding of the Essex tidal estuary had breached this hard infrastructure many times. When OURCOAST, an integrated coastal management program sponsored by the European Commission, did a cost-benefit analysis on alternatives for repairing the wall, the results showed that the seawall should no longer be maintained; instead, it should be “deconstructed” in five locations, creating an 80-hectare (about 200-acre) “soft and flexible”’ coastal defense zone. At the Abbotts Hall Farm of today, mudflats, salt marshes, and freshwater wetlands are used to absorb tidal and wave energies and to sustain an enlarged habitat that helps support commercial fisheries. The area has also become home to salt-tolerant crops, it acts as a carbon sink, and it provides a haven for wildlife—all at a cost savings of £500,000 ($805,550) over hard solutions.1
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Notes
- 1.
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Subsidence is attributable to both anthropogenic activities (drainage, soil oxidation, and groundwater withdrawals) as well as natural (compaction and tectonic down-warping activity).
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Michael Schwirtz. “Sewage Flows after Storm Expose Flaws in System,” New York Times, November 29, 2012.
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See: http://m.npr.org/news/front/166672858.
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© 2014 Hillary Brown
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Brown, H. (2014). Creating Resilient Coastlines and Waterways: Hard and Soft Constructions. In: Next Generation Infrastructure. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-202-0_6
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