The Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex Coast Forums, in partnership with the Anglian (Eastern) Regional Flood and Coast Committee, held the first annual East Anglian Coast and Estuaries conference on 12th October 2023 at Wherstead Park, Ipswich.
This was the second session of the day, after the morning break and before lunch. Apart from an intro and outro, this is unedited from the livestream. It is one of four sessions that took place.
There is just one presentation in this session. Karen Thomas presents in her role within the East Anglian Coastal Group, with a Q&A that follows.
Morning everybody uh I’m Karen Thomas uh from Coastal partnership East as Keith said um and I really hope that that film that we just showed you which was uh produced by uh James and our team um really gives you a flavor of uh the beautiful things that we have around our
Coast and I know everyone in the room today really appreciates the coast that we’ve got um what I’m going to be um talking to a little bit about today is the um Coastal groups around the country and mainly the East anglian Coastal group and I also would like to talk to
You a little bit about the work that we do um how our work and everything that we’re doing around the coast um plays into the shorel management plans and the um environment agency strategy you’ve heard about today and also to look forward a little bit about what our
Coast maybe might need to do and what we need to do to to create a more resilient Coast for the future so the national Coastal groups for anybody who who doesn’t know about them um they are around the whole of the country they are linked to our Shoreline management plan
Boundaries and um they’ve been set up at a national level um I’m currently the East anglian Coastal group chair and they’re made up of a range of practitioners and partners so if you like it’s the officers who are really doing a lot of the work around the
Country around England and Wales um we have other interested party so we um have uh NGS and our saty partners at the table and there they’re effectively there to make sure that we’re getting consistency around the coast that we’re learning from one another and that we
Can share good practice um and also a place where we try to solve some of the problems and I think from some of the presentations you’ve heard earlier today there are a lot of things that we need to address so over in East Anglia um we
Have um uh the the top of our the top of our patches jalter point and then that extends all the way around uh to the temp’s barrier so it’s a very very uh big Frontage and we have um a whole range of Shoreline management plans in
There which I’ll come on to later um the role of the groups is to look at the shoro management plans that we have to look at the next 100 years that those policies are trying to deliver um we’ve recently had Shor management plan refresh to look at the policies that are
In the shoreline management plans and make sure they’re fit for purpose so the groups are consules to the environment agency in Def for when they are doing plans and strategies like this um we are also Gathering evidence we’re gathering information and data with the anglian coastal monitoring group so that we can
Make the best financial decisions we can based on what our Coast is doing but also uh we’re looking at what our Coast is doing and many of us are quite surprised at what our Coast is doing at the moment as well and I think throughout this presentation the issue
Of pace and acceleration is something that we need to remember and also just about capacity and Resource as well I don’t know why that’s come up there again so I know that Ivan isn’t here today and I don’t know if any of you have seen Ivan’s presentations but
They are absolutely brilliant and they really bring into contact uh the climate change challenge that we’re facing as did uh John slides earlier um I just wonder if anyone in the room has um got children nieces nephews grandchildren you know they’re not here and I think for many of us that
Are doing this role um it’s a really really complicated job and we are trying to pull together an awful lot of information and trying to bring it to bear as GES was just trying to show trying to get things done on the coast is actually quite difficult we can come
On to some of the reasons why later but in the context of climate change and climate change evidence um you know the risk assessments that have been done nationally um ultimately um climate change on our Coast is is a high risk we have a very soft eroding
Coast um we have a lot of challenges um to deal with our habitats our freshwater people um it’s all happening here but the evidence definitely shows that we have seriously high risks around our part of the case for a number of reasons um and I’m just a bit confused
Because my slides are in completely the wrong order and this isn’t the right presentation so never mind um if we could just go back to we had some challenges earlier this morning trying to upload the presentation so I’m just going to go back to the beginning and I think I’m just going to
Leave that there so I think what I want to say today is I wanted to talk to about Sho management plans and why they’re quite difficult to deliver and I wanted to show you some really great pictures of some of the things that are happening around our Coast but what I’m
Going to do now is try and remember my presentation and explain it to you the way that I had it in my head last night so where we’re at at the moment is we’ve got acceleration of erosion on our Coast our beaches are lowering um we are
Seeing on most of our high tides the water is encroaching at the base of our Cliffs and our sand Junes and what that means is that for people who are living in those locations they are seeing um quite significant impacts um in the shoreline management plans um we’ve just
Done a little bit of work around the the various shorel management plans we’ve got around our Coast we we’ve got the wash we’ve got north norfol um we come around into Great Yarmouth and the East suffk and then into the suffet shoro management plans we’ve got about 700
Kilometers of Coast um and when we put that in the context of what we were hearing earlier about the Dutch Coast is about 400 km there’s a big Coastline here that we’ve got to try and manage the majority of our Coast is low Ling or at Coastal erosion risk and our shom
Management plan policies are really interesting for our Coast the majority of our Coast actually does have Hold the Line policies they’re just dotted all the way through and in between we have lots of noactive intervention and manag realignment policies and that’s where I think for most of us the challenge is
Coming with regard to how we’re going to fund things and how we’re going to move forward with adaptation so where we have a noactive intervention and a managed realignment policy on a floodable part of the coast what we have are some options we’ve probably got a defense there already
It’s probably somewhere if you imagine the s6s trees there’s probably an earth embankment of some kind and then depending on what it’s protecting it will be um revetted or it will have concrete or it will have sheet piling it depends but many of our low-lying are areas already have a defense of some
Kind but the shorel management plans don’t automatically present us with funding for those things so there’s still the challenge that that Giles was saying earlier about how you keep those defenses resilient for the things that they’re defending and you have to find the funding from somewhere to be able to
Keep them uh even resilient which I think we’re all starting to realize means that they can over top without breaching um but where we have managed realignment options in some of the floodable areas we have some alternative Funding Solutions we have um the regional habitat creation program approaches and natural flood management
Approaches so breaching defenses to create new salt marshes and to create new intertial areas and those are on various scales around the country um around 45% of our um policies of noactive intervention and hold the line are in flood risk areas so there are some solutions for those um how however I
Think where some of our biggest challenges lie is the fact that when we move into the coastal erosion sections of our Coast where we have sand dunes and low Cliffs uh what we’re really seeing there is around 50 55% maybe a bit more of our noactive intervention and manag reignment policies which are
Ultimately um without any solutions we don’t have an equivalent to uh a nature-based solution um and we don’t have um any compensation or Insurance options for people who are affected in those locations and some of those people are here today and for those people at the moment we don’t have Solutions and
We don’t have answers so in terms of our shine management plan policy delivery as a coastal group and as all of the practitioners that are involved it’s actually very difficult for us to to deliver anything and and if you really think about it that means that we can’t
Deliver a shoreline management plan for getting on for around half or twoth thirds sorry a third of our Coast so that sounds a bit depressing and obviously for people who are directly affected by erosion risk it is really difficult for us to have some of these discussions um and what that’s leading
To is quite reactive situations so ultimately what it means is that we have um we have situations like we had in hemsby in April this year uh where we had very serious high tides and high winds coinciding and we were able with our contractors at the time balers we
Were able to go in and do an emergency Rock solution now that rock solution was only possible because there happened to be a stockpile of 1,900 tons of rock that a holiday park nearby had a surplus if we want to get rock for anything we have at least a 9mon lead in
Time to get it so that doesn’t lend itself well to dealing with an emergency it’s okay for Capital scheme if we’re planning ahead which we are for chromer monsley at the moment but it doesn’t lend itself well to an emergency and also there are questions about whether
Or not we should really be using Rock in an emergency so one of the things that we’re now trying to think about is if we literally only got rock now that’s our only solution that we can use on our Coast to buy some time for our
Communities um how do we get rock how do we stock pilot how could we purchase some in advance so we can just use it for emergencies but also could we use it in adaptation sense as well which we can come on to so if you lived through that
Event in hemsby in in March and April um you ultimately were were I I don’t think I can really Express how difficult it is for people in those circumstances um to have not only had the worry the days before as that storm was building but also to really only be
In a situation where officers from the local Authority or from the teams that work around the coast are coming to you and effectively saying could you please just get out now you have to go you have to take your pets your children everything and unlike flood risk which
Is you know ultimately devastating when you are away from your property you don’t know if your property is going to be there when you get back and you don’t know what is going to happen to you so that’s where we need to start to move things on and I think it was
Mentioned earlier because for every for every place like hensby or pakefield or thorness or hayra who unfortunately become sort of like the poster children of erosion risk we need to think about the fact that there’s going to be another five or 10 of those communities that are going to start to have that
Level of erosion and flood risk in the future and that’s where we need to start thinking about adaptation but one of the difficulty that we Face listening to everything we’ve heard this morning is we are at that watershed moment right now we have got this opportunity we know that it’s
Going to get worse um but the real the real challenge that we’ve got is that there are some people who are in the problem at the moment they are facing the erosion and the flood risk right now and we need to work with them so it
Makes it really difficult for us to get to the point where we need to plan ahead with the planners and with the other people that were mentioned them this morning like the social scientists so we’ve been really lucky and very fortunate and we’ve all worked incredibly hard the members of the East
Anglian Coastal group um have uh been very successful in attracting some of the um uh flood and Coast resilience Innovation program funding and um I think this is a really incredible turning point in certainly the environment agency supporting us to do something different so ultimately a 200 million pound scheme has been available
Nationally and where we’re at now is that that’s been split into different different uh pots and between us in the in the region effectively we’ve attracted some 35 to 40 million pounds to really accelerate our work not erosion accelerate our work to be able to take that Leap Forward where we can
Actually get on the front foot of what is really required to make a coast more rilian or a community more rilian and to work with communities on what those solutions could be so um I did have some great slides from some of my colleagues so I’m just going to say now in North
Norfolk it’s been mentioned already we have the coastwise project looking at an SNP scale approach to adaptation on the North northfi Coast uh North North’s Coast Cliffs um are um you know probably the highest Cliffs we’ve got around our Coast they’ll fail overnight absolutely spectacularly when there’s a lot of
Heavy rain not necessarily so much from Coastal erosion and when they go everything goes with them so that type of erosion is very different to the erosion that we might be seeing in another part of the coast where you know we’ve got sand Junes eroding or something like that so coastwise working
With um the uh East ridings team as well are going to be looking at a whole range of different initiatives um and ultimately looking at how they can support communities on the North Coast to have this conversation that we’re starting to have here today about becoming more resilient and adaptive um
As we move round to Great Yarmouth and North Norfolk um we have have the resilient Coast project and that’s going to be doing similar things to coastwise we’re going to be looking at um how to give communities in both projects the options that they need so whether it’s
Funding um new planning whether it’s um looking at um how we can help people to visualize what a future might look like whether it’s about relocation um whatever it is we’re going to be exploring that in both the coastwise and the resilient Coast projects and then as
We come on down to South End um we have the catchment to Coast project and there’s different challenges there as you might expect taking a catchment based approach from the top of the river all the way down to the coast that project also has the additional challenge of legacy of landfill and
Rubbish seaw walls um and also you know balancing all of that with tourism and environmental enhancement so those are the projects and there also we have a fourth one which is reclaimed the rain which is led by norol and suff County Council and I think when we look at those four
Projects in the round for our region it it tells us something there were 25 projects nationally uh there was a two additional Coastal transition Coastal transition accelerator projects so there was 27 projects nationally that were funded and we have four of them in our patch and I think that’s because it just
Goes to show that we have got significant climate change impacts but we’ve also got a lot of innovation and collaboration going on in this part of the world and they wouldn’t have given us the funding if they didn’t think it was something that we could take forward and and do
Locally so um once we’ve once we’ve thought about our adaptation projects I think you know we then need to think about the fact that we still need to protect and defend in some places and we need to think about what we’re going to need to make that that Coastal
Transition happen so we have examples all around our coast of fantastic uh projects where we are holding the line as it’s called where we are defending the majority of people and property um we’ve got a large number of tidal barrier projects that have been delivered we have tidal barrier projects
Like lowestoft and even for great Yar of the question of a tidal barrier as well um in these locations we have uh large numbers of people large numbers of property large numbers of infrastructure and I think that certainly some of the barrier projects really identify the fact that we can’t just move everything
Away from the coast because there are certain industries and there are certain things that happen only at the coast so when we think about places like lowestoft or Great Yarmouth or ipswitch or even Tilbury they’re there because there are ports associated with that place you can’t take ports away from the
Coast and also they’re very important for our national economy and we’re in a very competitive market with other European ports to make sure that we are pretty Keen so another thing that’s really challenging around these projects around the larger towns is getting private investment and particularly in
The economic climate that we’re in at the moment and jles touched on that earlier the rising cost of everything if you want to do a big project at the moment and it involves concrete or steel um I think I’m can see tamson out there somewhere the cost the cost of
Everything’s just gone up um so much that it’s really difficult to keep Pace with the planning and the funding programs that we are actually in so our current funding program is a six-year cycle and we we go to the environment agency with our outline business cases
To fund our schemes but in order to attract all the private funding and the partnership funding that can take several years to get in place and heard from Charles this morning some cases 10 years or maybe even 15 years so we’re we’re not we haven’t got a system that’s
Quick enough for what’s happening on our Coast at the moment another thing that I think um is really important about looking at the hold the line frontages is the fact that that we need to think about the scale of them and we need to think about the
Wider outcomes that they deliver so in great yth at the moment the environment agency moving up through uh the town putting in um innovative ways to um manage the sheet piling so that we make the town more resilient for the future and you know ultimately looking at that
On a Town scale on many compartment scales um and thinking about how we can bring in developers and how we can make property more resilient in the places that are perhaps going to be harder to defend so all in all it’s about scale we need to go bigger we need to draw in
More people that are going to benefit from our project so that we can attract their funding but the bigger we go there’s a bit of a Tipping Point there somewhere between making it too big that it makes it hard to deliver versus attracting enough people to fund the
Project and I think the other side of things as well where we’ve got hold the line is we’ve actually got some great examples of nature-based solutions now as well the backton sand engine on on on a really big scale um you know huge hugely important for the UK gas supply
That we have that sediment there in front of the backton cliffs um and also for future investment as well because our Coast is a place where people want to invest in hydrogen potentially so getting our infrastructure right but also um on a small scale nature based Solutions make a big difference and many
Of our restri groups have got experience and the landowner groups here of doing small schemes that make a real difference in their place to Nature and you know help to create natural flood defenses as well so we’ve got lots of Hold the Line examples we’ve got lots of
Great we’ve got lots of great innovation in East Anglia um but it then comes to the adaptation side of things and how we deliver that so ultimately I think it’s been touched on many times today but funding is probably a really big challenge but we can’t keep going to the
Environment agency and saying can we have some more money please um if we really want to create a resilient place then we have to start to think about resilience in the round so in the round means is this a place that has a port
And the port can only be here is this a place where we want to have hydrogen generation is this a place where people want to come on holiday is this the place where people come and relax and I think somebody mentioned earlier mental health and well-being we are a nation of
People who love to go to the coast and I think we’re probably one of the only countries where people Park their cars and just stare out to see with a flask and it just Mists up I think many of you will have that recollection from from
Your past we like to look out from our coast and I think that just goes to show the value of our Coast so I think when it comes to adaptation and resilience we we we kind of know that East Anglia has a lot of potential it’s the only place that you
Can have wind turbines on the scale that we’ve got them but all their cables are coming in and out of a coast that’s one of the fastest eroding coasts in Northwest Europe and we’ve got gas pipelines and we’ve got potential for desalination plants because we’ve got a water supply issue so Coastal management
Isn’t about an engineer literally rocking up and going you can have rock or you can’t have it anymore it’s about us thinking about the planning system and I think one of the things that we’re really realizing with the Innovation program funding is that you know I think
Most projects will have planners at the heart of what they’re going to be doing and most of the people in the room that are working on those projects have already tried to reach out and get a planner um they are as rare as hen teeth these days so I think that was another
Challenge that I wanted to raise today actually is how do we get people to come and do this stuff because we are going to have some challenges around resourcing and I think to really scale this up to the level that we want to scale it up to um it’s about people and
It’s about officers being able to do their jobs and have all the right skills and bringing them together and having a space to do that whilst not necessarily constantly reacting to the issues that we’ve currently got right now being able to plan forward but also being incredibly sensitive to the fact that
There are people in very difficult circumstances at the moment on our Coast going into this winter that we will be working with and that’s going to be another challenge for all of us so I think I feel the same way that um I think John finished his um speech by
Saying I’m always the glass is half full I was here last year with Rachel Hill and I said then that I felt like this was a watershed moment we are being given an opportunity to take a massive leap forward with these additional funding streams that we’ve got but it’s
Also at the same time that things feel like they’re slowing down in other ways because of the economic situation we’ve got the the real challenges around Capital funding so I I think probably what I wanted to say was from the East anglian Coastal group’s perspective as a network
Of uh practitioners as a network of partners that that there are not a lot of us but we are all connected into a range of organizations and a range of Partnerships and approaches and um one of the things that I wanted to do to today in a minute as I’m I’m just going
To forewarn anyone here from the um East angan Coastal group that I might want you to stand up in a minute um I think I just wanted to reflect on some of the highlights of of the the work that the group have been doing over the last sort
Of year or so so um these are people who are coming into local authorities into the environment agency Natural England the rspb there many of them are in the room and they come to work and it is a vocation I think ultimately because I don’t think a lot of people would would
Do this work if they didn’t think they could make a difference and I think most of us have come from a background of climate change um we have studied it we have known about it and we are trying to do something about it so it’s a very
Positive place um but in the last 12 months the East anglian Coastal group has um done a whole range of different things we have we have links into the national uh Coastal group network we have the opportunity to speak to the regional flood and Coastal committees um
And the environment agency and defra so we always carry up the challenges that we face on this Coast with us whatever we are doing the officers are gathering information through the anglian coastal monitoring program we’ve got one of the longest standing monitoring programs in the UK in this patch and that is telling
Us in that’s telling us things but there’s more things that we need to know that we don’t know yet so um I think it was Richard the other day that was telling me that um perhaps there was an observation that we were getting more easterly than than than we’d had in the
Past and if we are getting more E le than we had in the past and that is now a trend that really does have impacts on how we manage the coast particularly in places that are east facing um the group has also um done a lot of work around the shoreline
Management plans sort of stress testing the environment agency nationally has looked at the shoreline management plans around the whole Coast there’s 22 we have five and the shorel management plan refresh has allowed us to think about whether or not the policies we’ve got are right um and when we say right um
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are easy to deliver but that doesn’t mean that they’re the wrong policy um we’ve also been working on the national erosion risk mapping project and we’re hoping that early next year we’ll start to receive data and information from the environment agency about our erosion
Risk around our coast and when that arrives we’ll be able to start to see what is at risk now what’s likely to be at risk in the future that’s going to be incredibly important to feed into planning and I think probably one of the biggest things that I’ve learned since
Being at a local Authority is the importance of the local plan and I worked at the environment agency for for many years and you know as an officer there we didn’t really necessarily know about what all the local authorities did and the planning approaches so being in
This position now where we can say collectively how important local plans will be because we need to get adaptation and resilience and some of the challenges that we’ve got on our Coast into the local plan because so much of what we do or don’t do in coastal management will impact on the
Ambitions of local communities and our local authorities as well um we’ve also been having the opportunity to look at um nafra which I think is the national flood risk um assessment modeling think Le nodding yeah thank you um I was I don’t so that’s where we’ve got models already so
This is a really good example of efficiencies and sort of trying to save taxpayers funding Giles talked earlier about a number of models that were done for the old and or and there are models for the deban and there are models for the temps and different people do different models for different reasons
And what I think is great about that project is it’s saying well let’s get a bit of a baseline together let’s look at all of these models let’s put them all in one place overlap them all and see what they tell us and can we be certain
About something as as as John showed with the meteor ology modeling earlier when when several models are telling you the same thing you can have some confidence so you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of more money on modeling which is a very expensive thing to
Do the group’s also um been looking at um the the um UNESCO uh work that the rspb are doing which we’re really excited about and I’m really pleased Adam’s here so I’m not going to say much more about that but I didn’t know Adam was going to be speaking today so
Thankfully that’s just saved me Adam but the the grp group is really supportive of um bringing more um of of Nature and environment into the work we do particularly as I would say historically Coastal groups have maybe come from more of an engineering background so I think it’s really important that we embrace
All the different skills that we need to to manage our Coast um and then I think um I really just wanted to end with sort of like what does what’s the forward look so the coastal group uh do a lot of work with the local government Association Coastal Sig special interest
Group as well um we are currently in a situation where we’re reviewing things like the Regeneration of Seaside towns report Lord Lord um Bassam was here a couple of years ago I think it was four years ago the report had only just been released and it was really identifying
The challenges that Coastal communities face the uniqueness of coastal communities and the challenges they face as well because they’re not the same as everywhere else and I think it’s been said before one of the biggest challenges we face is that half of our Frontage is wet and out there the sea
Doesn’t bring us the benefits that you get if you were in an in an inland place but I think we can do something about that on this Coast because there is stuff out there now it’s not just the wet there’s there’s wind farms and cables and infrastructure companies
Coming to our Coast to do things so we’ve got to really start to look at the economics um I think a lot of our work now will start to to to move towards how we value our Coast what is the value of it not just in flood defense terms but
Actually in all of those economic environmental and social terms and and hopefully that will help us to demonstrate to other government departments why this is important um the final thing I wanted to say is that um there is currently a a motion for a coastal Minister which the
LJ Coastal Sig and the coastal group network support and I think having that individual oversight of our coast and perhaps treating the coast more as an interconnected thing rather than lots and lots of different local authorities ities environment agency and everybody else having that oversight and overview
Of our Coast that we can value it in a different way and I think the coast is so important to us nationally as well I think um Angie uh is here today we talked about this if you’re even if you’re sat in Birmingham on a Friday
Night and you you’ve got Netflix on and you’re eating some chips uh that internet’s coming through our Coast so you’re getting to watch Netflix in Birmingham because it’s coming through our coast and our ports are bringing in those fish that you’re having and our farmers are growing those potatoes so um
All we want is for a coast that is probably right on the Forefront of climate change challenge to really be given perhaps a bit of additional support in the short term we are the for runners of a lot of this and a lot of what we learn on adaptation will go to
All of the other parts of the country later on so I just wanted to ask all of my East anglian Coastal group officer colleagues to stand up just for a moment please because there’s not loads them um they’re not going to they’re going to be
Shy okay thank you and I just want you to see that there’s not a lot of people trying to make a difference on your Coast but all of these people are um but hopefully um you’ll recognize somebody that’s standing up and you’ll understand that each of these people is
Representing an organization or group that is also connected to a community uh and we are trying our best I think is probably what I’d like to say today so on that note I will pause there and apologize that I didn’t get to show you any of the lovely photos I was going to
Show you so thank you right huge thank you to Karen because that’s the ultimate thing if somebody pinches your PowerPoint slides um so it did remarkably well at least brought the words Karen thanks so much and I think that highlighted a lot of complexities that we know about the
Coast and it sets us up perfectly with break for lunch in a little while but we’ve got time for a few questions um but set up perfectly for those workshops this afternoon and certainly carry on some of these conversations over lunch and when you visit our um our stands and
Stuff from our exhibitors as well so as I say we’ve got a few minutes before lunch so happy to take a couple of questions have I gentlemen at the back than very much for a very good presentation um I’m Vince langon Morris I’m I’m from east suff Council um I was
Talking to a fisherman in alra uh who was telling me about um the removal of shingle off of the coast in licensed areas uh by he stated Dutch companies and also chatting to Seas um recently about this there’s a Blog called Marinet and the chap that did it has un
Unfortunately died in 2019 but it has some Fab ous information about the amount of shingle being taken off just off of our Coastline and whether you’d considered that as an having an impact on these increasing erosion rates this removal of shingle which is apparently going to building projects all across
Europe but does that change our Coastline and have an effect thanks okay um I know that I’ve got some colleagues in the room who’ll be able to add to this if I don’t get this quite right but um most of well all of the all of the offshore and Nearshore dredging that is
Done is done under license um there has to be significant environmental impact assessment work done before anyone can be given a license um the technical side of things is that most of it’s done in uh what I would call deeper water the North Sea is not particularly deep but
Is deeper water and um from a coastal processes perspective most of the challenges that we face on our Coast with regard to erosion uh and shifting Beach levels and everything else is more to do with Longshore and Nearshore processes uh we have Coastal bars we have Coastal um Nearshore spits and
Basically seasonally everything’s working its way backwards and forwards on and off the coast and up and down the coast so um my understanding is that anything that is being licensed offshore is being done in a very very very regulated way and they have to demonstrate if they were having any
Impact on the wider environment but I I’m going to look at um Kelly and David Kemp from the environment agency because I know we always get questions from is that is that okay okay I’m getting a thumbs up that that was gave the right answer thanks Karen you obviously you
Can color David Kemp and colleagues at lunchtime everybody knows who David is you’ll thank me for saying that um any other questions before we break for Lun gentlemen Andrew oh uh Karen following on from that and looking then at Nearshore sediments uh and the uh importance of warping up that
Um of the um fields that was necessary to create the wesy wild coast and thinking where that sediment comes from um and and linking that to to your your comment on how important uh our our local ports are uh and bearing in mind the huge effect they have and the
Dredging they do uh and whether one cannot find some way of making better use of those cements rather than dumping them out in deeper water I the the material that’s been dredged out of harch Harbor is equivalent to the entire volume of salt marsh on the Essex coast
And one suspects that has some degree of effect in the long term of removing that sediment from The Long Shore drift how can we work with the port to get better use and more environmental sustainability by using those ports to raise the land levels to make nature uh n nature benefit Solutions more
Reasonable and more cost effective um okay so I think one of the challenges we’ve got with the East Coast EST well all estries is that they are they are silting up that’s what they’re supposed to do so obviously from the ports perspective to maintain that navigable channels they’ve got to dredge
Out what’s coming in from the sea I think I’m right in saying that the majority of sediment doesn’t come down the river is it is coming in from the sea um and as a result of that um what you are taking out I mean obviously it
Depends where you are we know some we know some ports do trickle recharge where they put it back into the water column so the stur and Orwell is a good example of that um but you know we also know that we can take those sediments and place them as we have done on
Projects that we’ve both worked on Andrew um on top of salt marshes done in places that are you know in need of sediment however I think we also recognize um the fundamental challenge is more to do with the mechanics so a big dredger that is full of sediment
Cannot get in easily to the places that we would want to get it into and the cost of transferring onto smaller dredges or getting smaller dredges to do it so they can get in close to the shore obviously um means that you know there’s a cost aspect to that and then finally
Obviously there’s the challenge of taking Mar Marine sediments and placing them inside a terrestrial site and all of the challenges of of waste licensing and things like that so I don’t think anything’s impossible nothing’s impossible it’s just how much things cost and if somebody wants to do it
Badly enough then that it’s basically what we’re doing about engineering at the moment we’re putting out calls to the industry to say well there’s got to be something other than Rock so if we want smaller dredgers that do more efficient jobs so they can get close to
The shore the dredging industry needs to see why there’s a reason for them to do that and there isn’t enough in the system yet for them to be able to go oh that looks exciting maybe we’ll invent a different type of judger so I think that’s where taking a strategic approach
A catchment based approach to how we manage our Coast looking at these big issues and whether or not they can be addressed by perhaps completely new Innovative technology ultimately that has to be done pretty soon if we want to get people to it’s like electric cars
And everything else if we want people to do it and adopt it we’ve got to start now haven’t we I don’t think we should say no to anything until we’ve worked out if it’s a really terrible idea thanks Karen and final question before lunch and I you’re all facing this way
And I can see Lun at the back this gentl hi ter all the way from Lewis um when we do Coast I hope we can arate this question and it was partly our conversation over coffee briefly um we do Co what I call fantasy Coastal Engineering where we look at all the
Long list options yeah can I pose a question is there a fantasy Coastal adaptation management Hinterland financial planning we should be doing about how we really pull this together around how we Finance this because ja was hinting at it John definitely was hinting at it our model is around cost benefit ratios around
What we’re looking at in the shorter term but our model needs to be about how do those fishing chips get delivered yeah in Birmingham but also how we also make sure we’ve got something we can manage when we’ve only got no time to manage it because there’s no because
There extreme sea level rises yeah um I think probably as a group of practitioners we’ve we we recognize the importance of flood defense grant and aid as a piece of the pie but I think we’ve grown up in a world where we did an outline business case and got mainly
Flood defense Grant and a and we might get a little bit of extra top up from from partnership funding or the rfcc would be supportive or whatever I think we’ve reached a point where we’ve got projects that are now more partnership funding than they are flood defense
Grant and aid and as a result of that the question I suppose is and we we we know that outline business cases for flood defense grant and aid you know working with our Consultants are starting to cost increasingly more and more because they’re becoming more and more complicated to write uh perhaps one
Of the things that will come out of the work that we’re doing across these really important innovation projects is do we just need a different type of business case and do we have a business case that isn’t just for one organization anymore maybe we have a government business case and each
Department gets to to have a look at how we’ve you know decided that was the bit of the pie that we were hoping to get from them so I think that that could be really important and certainly as officers who’ve got limited time trying to write multiple business cases to
Different organizations for different pots of money that are going at different you know 10 years 3 years 6 months time intervals I think that’s a really really important way to be more efficient and perhaps people will get a better business case at the other end as well because we’re sort of trying to
Shoehorn stuff in that just doesn’t work um so yeah I think that’s an important one and I think the other one which you sort of alluded to is if there’s only one option don’t do a long list of options if that’s what the community want and can buy into and it’s it sits
With the shoreline management plan policy don’t spend a year trying to tell everybody why you’ve gone through a long list of options I think you just have to say CU that none of them will work and we will have to be a bit more accepting of the fact that well actually yeah they
Probably won’t so right thanks Karen thank you for the question um if we can just thank Karen for her time right ladies and gentlemen we’ve reached the lunchtime point so just before you go first things to say back for 1:30 please we’ve got um Professor gwood this afternoon and obviously we’ve
Got the workshops as well which is building on on your chance if you haven’t had a chance to ask questions to talk through some of the issues that we’ve heard this morning and some of the challenges that John and others have placed before you please do a have some
Food otherwise you’ll faint B make sure that you go and see our exhibitors and more importantly um The Pledge for the in the pledge for the coast in the air of the coast take time to talk to those people and think about what you’re going to do for the coast going forwards thank
You ever so much for your time and your participation this morning have Lunch