A Radical Approach to Flooding in England: Give Land Back to the Sea
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/europe/uk-steart-marshes-carbon-climate-change-flooding.html
In a project costing 20 million pounds (around $26 million), tidal waters were allowed to flood the Steart Peninsula in 2014 for the first time in centuries.
Rather than attempting to resist the sea, the land was given back to it. It was, in the words of Alys Laver, the conservationist who oversees the site, a “giant science experiment.”
A decade on, its results might offer a blueprint for how some parts of Britain — and the rest of the world — might adapt to the reality of climate change.
[...]
Steart is often described as a “rewilding” project, but Ms. Laver prefers not to use that term. The terrain has been returned to nature but it has been engineered by human ingenuity and curated by human hands.
“Looking after the site requires a lot of intervention,” Ms. Laver said, sheltering from a brief, furious rain squall in a bird blind. Through a window, we surveyed a landscape that was still, but ever-changing; natural, but human-made; new, but as it once was.