After another autumn of high tides and battering winds, harbour towns up and down the coast are asking the same question: how do you protect a waterfront that was never designed for the weather it now gets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer, increasingly, is not one big wall. Engineers and planners are mixing hard defences with softer ones, and asking residents to accept that some streets will flood now and then so others never do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Concrete seawalls still have their place, especially in front of ports and rail lines. But they are expensive to build and can make erosion worse on neighbouring beaches. Many councils are now pairing shorter walls with restored dunes, salt marsh and oyster reefs that soak up wave energy before it reaches the shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These living shorelines<\/strong> take years to mature, and they need space that towns don’t always have. Where they work, they also bring back birds, fish and visitors, which helps win over sceptical residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Funding is the sticking point. Most coastal projects rely on a patchwork of national grants, local taxes and insurance-linked bonds. Smaller towns say the application process favours big cities that can afford full-time bid writers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We know what needs doing. What we don’t have is the money to do it all at once.” That’s how one harbour engineer summed up the mood at a regional planning meeting this month.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In the short term, expect more temporary barriers, earlier flood warnings by text message and some car parks turned into overflow basins during spring tides. Longer term, a handful of low-lying streets may be raised or, in a few cases, gradually returned to the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of it is glamorous. But after a decade of near misses, coastal communities seem ready to trade a little convenience for a lot more certainty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From living shorelines to raised promenades, harbour towns are rethinking how to hold back the sea, and who pays for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11,10,12],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-cities","tag-climate","tag-infrastructure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.unitedtheme.com\/newspulse-plus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Who pays for the work?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What residents can expect this winter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n