ENDURE
Date de début
13/07/2017Date de fin
31/12/2020Project budget
2 116 635 €ERDF amount
1 269 981 €ERDF rate
60%À propos
Common challenge
Climate change causes sea level rise across the 2 Seas area by 2-4mm each year. This increases risk of coastal flooding x100 in some areas, impacting people, communities & infrastructure. Many traditional defences are old, failing & expensive to replace. A 9km sea wall costs >€88 million but does not provide a permanent, economically sustainable sea defence. Natural ecosystems provide better resilience - dunes naturally flex & evolve to provide a self-replenishing barrier, but this adaptive ability is often negatively affected by poor/reactive management aimed at mitigating erosion/flooding events rather than enhancing dune function. Sand dunes protect 420km of our shared coastline, yet they do not receive the same attention given to more traditional hard interventions. Joint working & crossborder collaboration is poor, lacking input & learning from high quality cutting-edge science, research & design expertise.
Overall objective
Main outputs
Cross border approach
Main Achievements
During the first year of the ENDURE Project, ensuring the resilience of sand dunes against climate change, has seen all partners meet their targets. The next two years will also be full of activities and deliverables.
One goal of the project was to produce a mapping tool to help both dune site owners and managers but also help inform a wider range of organisations. Building this tool required working with a contractor S.Deltares; the partners are working hard to make first drafts available in the second quarter of 2019.
The mapping tool will also be accompanied by examples of land use management. These scenario-based images will show what happens to fictional sites when applying various planning decisions. This will become a great tool for raising awareness at policy level!
Another essential component of the work is looking at soft methods for dune management. The contract for making the sand net, which will be used to capture sand and help reduce erosion in the Baie de l'Authie in France, was signed and installation will happen early 2019. This was accompanied by drone footage to map the situation pre-installation. Drone monitoring will help create visual results. The drones also monitored the situation of sand movements around mussel posts and the project will monitor their impact on wave action. This may even prove that mussel posts also act as a cost-effective solution to harsh erosion of the dunes.
Working with stakeholders has been the backbone of 2018 and has helped the work around the strategy to control access to dune sites. Interesting ideas are emerging at 4 sites in the UK and this will be accompanied by an innovative awareness raising campaign to ensure effectiveness.
Raising awareness is also a major priority and all partners have begun working with stakeholders and observer partners to look at solutions to increase knowledge amongst the general public, but also increase site managers' capacity for ensuring better dune resilience. A full campaign will be launched in 2019.
The project has also created a series of social media profiles to run alongside the website and there has been good engagement with the page so far, this will play an important part in future dissemination and engagement.
Through all these activities, interactions with experts from the 4 countries, not only within the partnership, but also the observers/stakeholders, has helped shape the work, methods and monitoring. We are very much looking forward to 2019!