The Conditions for Optimism (1): ten lessons from Wallasea Island

Either side of the new year, I visited three of the RSPB’s most impressive conservation projects in England.  Last week I was with RSPB colleagues exploring our work in the Pennines and the Lakes brought to life by short, winter-appropriate tours of Geltsdale and Haweswater (with the latter looking particularly picturesque after a dusting of snow); back in December, I returned to Wallasea Island for the first time since we breached the sea wall (in 2015) to see the impact of what is Europe's largest coastal habitat restoration project. 

In a year when we are making the case for new targets for nature’s recovery at home (through the Westminster Environment Bill and equivalent legislation across the UK) and globally (to replace the 2020 Aichi targets), we need to apply the lessons from what we have already achieved to help us deliver the step change that we need to address the climate and nature emergency.  As I have written previously, if we are successful in securing a new target of 30% of land to be well protected and managed for nature by 2030, we need a six-fold increase from where we are today, which based on condition assessments of terrestrial protected areas in the UK is just 5% of the UK. What's more, Defra is committed to providing 500,000 hectares of new habitat in England.

Given that I am returning to northern England in the spring, I thought today, I’d put a spotlight on what we have achieved through the Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project, offer my personal take on the key ingredients as to why it is so successful and say what it means for the future of coastal habitat creation.  It will be an attempt to continue my conditional optimism theme for the year.  You can familiarise yourself with the project by watching the video below.

The big context to Wallasea Island is the decline of state of nature at the coast where 58% of species have declined in the recent decades.  This is perhaps not surprising given the scale and extent of habitat loss since the Second World War: 8,000 hectares of saltmarsh (constituting 15% of the UK resource), 16,000 ha of sand dunes (18%) and 5,000 ha of shingle (46%).  The RSPB has been a the forefront of trying to restore lost coastal habitat.

My colleague Malcolm Ausden has (with others) written an excellent paper on the impact of RSPB’s wetland restoration which featured in the June 2019 issue of British Birds.  In it, he explains that “most intertidal habitat creation schemes that the RSPB has been involved in have been partnership projects, aimed at providing both valuable wildlife habitat and improve coastal defence, or to provide compensatory habitat for intertidal areas lost through development.  Most schemes have used managed realignment which involves setting back the sea walls to allow tidal flooding of the seaward side.”  He goes on to say that “the key roles of the RSPB have been to help facilitate schemes and to improve their design in ways that benefit birds and other wildlife.  The main improvements have been achieved through incorporating lagoons and islands, to provide feeding areas and safe high-tide roosts for birds and safe nesting sites for waders, gulls and terns.” 

This sounds pretty straightforward, but any of these projects require an enormous amount of skill, determination and ingenuity.  And the team behind Wallasea Island (people like Jeff Kew, Chris Tyas and Mark Dixon) had that in spades.

You can read all about the background to Wallasea Island here.  Suffice to say that the results have already been stunning.  For example, the habitat work completed in 2019 resulted in 146 pairs of breeding avocets, 124 corn bunting territories in the summer and 21,400 waterbirds in winter. The recently created saline lagoons are supporting a huge number of of waterbirds with more than 5,300 birds recorded during the last Wetland Bird survey in October.  

So what made it successful?  Listening to Jeff, Chris and Malcolm tell the whole story last month, I pulled out ten things which I think made Wallasea Island a success and which could guide future schemes...

1. Governments have a responsibility to set the ambition and political framework to restore habitat at scale: the UK Biodiversity Action Plan set targets to restore coastal habitats while the EU Nature Directives provided the obligations to replace those lost from development or predicted to be lost from coastal squeeze resulting from climate change.  Laws and political commitments are crucial in making the case for the intervention but also in mobilising funding especially from the statutory bodies like the Environment Agency.  That's why we have been campaigning for legal targets to drive nature's recovery for example through the Environment Bill in England.
2. Big projects need big partners: as well as EA, we were fortunate to be introduced by a colleague from CEFAS to those involved in Crossrail. It transpired that we could help each other and developed a formal partnership.  Excavated material from Crossrail’s tunnels and stations being used to raise the level of the land prior to the breach as 1528 shipments delivered 3 million tonnes of excavated material with nearly 80% of the material transported by rail and by water.
3. Be ready to exploit the opportunities when they come your way: the RSPB's team in East Anglia first shared their vision for Wallasea Island in 2000 but we needed a catalyst to kickstart the project.  In 2006, Defra committed to creating a managed realignment site along the north of Wallasea Island to compensate for the intertidal habitat lost elsewhere in southeast England. The RSPB won the tender to manage this site for five years from March 2007.
4. Great people make great projects happen: a project like Wallasea Island requires people with a huge range of expertise including those that know about the planning system, ecology and project management skills.  They are essential both to help navigate the complexity of the consenting process but also to ensure that the design of the scheme works for wildlife.
5. Any vision needs to be future-proof and reflect environmental change: this may seem obvious, but with a project spanning more than a decade, the design of any scheme needs to maximise opportunities for future nature and in the case of Wallasea Island that means adapting to sea level rise and creating space for climate colonists - those species whose range will be shifting as a result of climate change.  We also had to help wildlife adapt to the major changes we were making. For example we had to help the important corn bunting population manage the shift away from an arable habitat to a predominantly wetland landscape.
6. Use lessons learnt from experience: much of what we did at Wallasea Island was inspired by previous habitat creation projects done either by the RSPB or other organisations around the world.  You can't go too far wrong if you apply the mantra of LEARN - DO - DEMONSTRATE.
7. Be prepared to adapt if circumstances change: not everything goes to plan and you need to have flexibility to change your thinking when the need arises.  For example we shifted away from our initial plan for regulated tidal exchange to managed realignment to help control costs.
8. Proactively manage relationships with key stakeholders: the success of Wallasea Island was ultimately dependent on support from the local community (both recreational and commercial interests), the local planning authorities and of course the project partners - Environment Agency and Crossrail.  This doesn't happen by chance but needs the right investment of time and effort. 
9. Show the impact: monitoring of progress against objectives is obviously key to be able to demonstrate that we were on track and that to report the impact of the scheme.  
10. Be in it for the longhaul: projects of the scale of Wallasea Island don't happen overnight and it is now two decades since we first shared our vision for Wallasea Island.  Thanks to the support of successive RSPB trustees and RSPB members, staff were given the confidence to build and deliver the vision.  It goes without saying that this all needs to be back up with a shed load of hard work and personal resilience when things go wobbly!

Defra's 25 Year Environment Plan committed the UK Government to “restore losses suffered over past 50 years”.  This means we need to continue to protect what we have and to redouble our efforts to restore lost habitat.  At the coast that could mean creating more than 20,000 hectares!  We know from the analysis and mapping undertaken as part of our Sustainable Shores project that there are more than enough places around the coast (we estimate 34,250 ha) where we can replace what has been lost and will be lost in the future. We know what we need to do, where to do it, why and how.

But we still haven’t got close to replacing even 25% of the UK area of coastal habitat that has been lost since 1945, and we are struggling to keep up with what continues to be lost each year.  Shoreline Management Plans could create over 6000ha new habitat by 2030 but the rate of implementation would (according to the Adaptation Sub-Committee in 2013) have to increase 5-fold.

So, we have our work cut out to deliver change on this scale over this decade.  But our experience at Wallasea Island provides lessons for how to make this happen.  Of course, the best way to get to know Wallasea Island is to go and see it for yourself! You can plan your visit here.  Do go, and be prepared to be inspired.