coastal resilence project

PROJECT OVERVIEW

SCALE: 37,579 ha

LOCATION: North Kent Marshes, spanning the Thames, Medway and Swale estuaries.

CORRIDOR ROLE: The final filtration and buffering system before land meets sea - delivering biodiversity enhancement, climate adaptation and coastal protection for internationally designated sites for bird communities

GET INVOLVED

  • Coastal and floodplain grazing marsh restoration

  • Managed re-alignment

  • Saltmarsh restoration

  • Water storage on marginal land for marsh re-wetting

  • Reedbeds and saline lagoon creation

  • Seagrass bed restoration

CORE INTERVENTIONS

ECOSYSTEMS SERVICES & BENEFITS

  • Reduced coastal flood and erosion risk close to urban centres and key infrastructure

  • Nutrient interception measures

  • Carbon storage and sequestration

  • Nutrient pollution reduction and water quality improvement

  • Recovery of threatened habitats and species

INVESTMENT OUTCOMES

  • Risk management: increased resilience to flooding and climate change

  • Corporate sponsorship for internationally important coastal landscape

  • Carbon removal for the emerging blue carbon market

  • Coastal habitat BNG units

  • Local fishing industry resilience

  • Bathing water quality improvement

  • Access to nature for deprived communities

NATURAL CAPITAL ESTIMATES

  • salt marsh, mudflats & seagrass

    Saltmarsh, mudflat, seagrass meadows and native oyster beds are among the most valuable habitats on Earth for carbon storage, flood defence and marine life - and among the most threatened by coastal squeeze.

    Across the Medway and Swale, Chalk to Coast analysis indicates over 300 ha of coastal habitat could be lost by 2105 under current shoreline management, unless space is created for it to move inland.

  • COASTAL BIRDS

    The Medway and Swale hold internationally important populations of migratory, breeding and wintering waders and wildfowl - the reason for their SSSI, SPA and Ramsar designations - with the lapwing and the top-predator marsh harrier among the flagship species.

  • nightingale

    Few sounds in nature are as celebrated as the song of the nightingale.

    British numbers have collapsed by more than 90% in fifty years. The Hoo Peninsula and north Kent are now among its last strongholds.

    A summer visitor that crosses the Sahara to breed here, the nightingale needs areas of wet ground, dense scrub and some bare ground beneath it to thrive.

  • shrill carder bee

    The shrill carder bee is Britain's rarest bumblebee, clinging on in just five isolated pockets after the flower-rich grasslands it needs were lost to intensive farming from the 1950s on.

    Its largest stronghold strongholds is the Thames Estuary — the sea-wall and grazing-marsh grasslands of the Hoo and the Swale, at the very heart of this corridor.

    It is a late-nesting bee that depends on well managed grasslands with an unbroken succession of wildflowers from May right through to October.

get involved