ENsuring DUne REsilience against Climate Change (ENDURE)

Description:

Climate change causes sea level rise across the 2 Seas Interreg Programme area (the Southern North Sea and the Channel area), increasing the risk of coastal flooding and impacting people, communities and infrastructure.

The project will look at establishing sand dunes as adaptive, living sea defences. Many traditional concrete sea defences are old and failing and can be expensive or challenging to maintain. Natural ecosystems can provide better, more resilient protection: sand dunes naturally migrate, flex and evolve to create a self-replenishing barrier to the sea. However, this adaptive ability is often compromised by poor and/or reactive management that deals with the aftermath of erosion or flooding events, rather than preventing these events from happening in the first place. Over three years the project partnership will work collaboratively using the best of cutting-edge science, design and innovation, to develop a coastline with more natural resilience to erosion, flooding and rising sea levels.

The ENDURE project is organised in three work packages, each answering a challenge facing coastal managers and communities.

• New solutions for dune resilience;
• Building tools to increase stakeholder capacity;
• Educating coastal communities and stakeholders.

Project information

Lead

Norfolk County Council, United Kingdom

Partners

Flanders Hydraulics Research, Belgium

University of Ghent, Belgium

CPIE (Centre Permanent d’Initiatives pour l’Environnement), France

Cerema (Centre d'études et d'expertise sur les risques, l'environnement, la mobilité et l'aménagement), France

HHNK (Hoogheemraadschap Holland Noorderkwartier), Netherlands

Source of funding

INTERREG Two Seas Programme 2014-2020