Fight, Flight, or Live in Harmony? Managed Retreat from Disappearing Shores

Fight, Flight, or Live in Harmony? Managed Retreat from Disappearing Shores

Why managed retreat?

Surfer’s Point in Ventura, California was one of the world’s top surfing destinations, renowned for its waves. But over time, these waves eroded the shoreline, causing structural damage to public facilities like parking lots and bike paths. The city had attempted to “harden” the coast, a process of installing concrete or rock structures like breakwaters and seawalls, with little success. It became clear that there was one solution to Surfer Point’s deterioration: managed retreat, otherwise known as coastal realignment.

Top: Before the retreat, 2010.  Bottom: After the retreat, 2013.  The Surfers’ Point Managed Retreat Shoreline Project included shifting parking areas and bike paths over 40 feet away from the coastline. Images taken from Climate.gov

 

Managed retreat is the process of moving development further inland, and allowing the ocean to re-engineer the coast. It’s a critical climate change adaptation tool that enables coastal communities to continue enjoying the shoreline, and the shoreline to continue existing in its natural state. When sea level accommodation policies like elevating homes, or erosion protection measures like coastal hardening are not effective in stopping damage to infrastructure, managed retreat can protect both community access to the shore and public facilities. By retreating human development from the shoreline, we also protect the natural processes and habitats of the coastal environment. 

Top: Eroded beach and waterfront infrastructure at Surfers’ Point, Ventura, CA, 1995. Bottom: Surfers’ Point after Phase 1 restoration, 2015. Images taken from State of Hawaii Office of Planning.

 

At Ventura’s Surfer’s Point, the ongoing 20-year managed retreat process has successfully removed and relocated public infrastructure and preserved the beach’s surf break. This feat of engineering was a remarkable collaboration of community organizing, stakeholder engagement, and problem-solving.

To retreat or not to retreat?

Managed retreat, however, is a “Wicked Issue”, the term policymakers use to describe a particular kind of conundrum that inherently has no right or wrong answer, and as part of its extreme complexity, has incomplete and socially conflicting resolutions. 

In Hawaii, the “wickedness” is acutely felt. As sea levels are rising, many of Hawaii’s waterfront communities are facing extreme erosion, and competing interests are making it difficult to establish a concrete policy. Different stakeholders have political and ideological differences, and budget limitations all make managed retreat a contentious problem. 

Moving infrastructure from harm’s way is an opportunity to restore habitats

In New York, Hurricane Sandy prompted the managed retreat of an entire Staten Island community, resulting in environmental benefits.

Oakwood Beach residents formed a committee and initiated a buyout program in collaboration with the state. The program purchased the residents’ homes at pre-hurricane market value and converted the land to natural buffers like breakwater reefs, or recreational spaces like hiking trails. Despite losing the previous neighborhoods,  in some cases, locals feel that by restoring natural wetlands they are regaining access to their beaches, and the natural spaces they remember from their childhoods.

If there’s no beach, there’s no beach access. Habitat and infrastructure at risk from eroding Maui resort and condo shores. Image taken from State of Hawaii Office of Planning.

 

More accessible shorelines could improve locals’ ability to enjoy coastal recreation, and cultural and subsistence activities. If moving development back from the water’s edge leads to restoration of natural shallow water and tidal ecosystems, managed retreat could not only reconnect the community to revived ecosystems, but also bring back natural buffers to protect inland development from sea level rise and increased storminess.

What can be done when we can’t retreat?

Where coastlines can be made more natural, Living Shorelines – the restoration of natural features like dunes and marshlands, can be an effective way to cope with rising seas and erosion. Shifting lifeless concrete coasts to living shores can increase the buffer space for high-water flooding and add ecological value. 

Soft edges, or living shorelines, can provide space for ecosystems and storm buffering on urban coasts. Image taken from NOAA.

For coastal areas like ports and certain working waterfronts, despite risk from sea-level rise and erosion, retreating from the water’s edge may not work, and restoring a living shoreline may not be feasible. Where public shoreline access and infrastructure are at risk, and managed retreat isn’t the right option, eco-engineering can provide a win-win solution.

We can achieve both structural stability and ecological regeneration with Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF), defined as “landscape features that are used to provide engineering functions relevant to flood risk management while producing additional economic, environmental, and/or social benefits.” Hardened coastal protections (like breakwaters, seawalls, and edge protections) can be engineered to revive natural systems by stimulating oyster reefs, corals, and other ecosystem-engineering organisms that set the foundations for larger species. 

ECOncrete® is putting NNBF principles into action. On the edge of the Port of San Diego’s Harbor Island, a new waterfront protection technology is being installed to increase habitat value, and stabilize the Port’s shoreline. A modular single-layer tidepool armor, designed to interlock on each of its eight faces, allows engineered waterfronts to mimic the water retaining features, undercuts, and caves characteristic of natural shallow-water ecosystems.

Ecological coastal armor can protect a shoreline from erosion while providing better conditions for biodiversity.

The biology-enhancing concrete units are designed to increase native flora and fauna, so instead of a barren concrete beach, there’s a platform for a rich community of sessile organisms like oysters, canopy algae, and sea anemones, as well as shelter and nursing ground opportunities for native fish.

Coastal armor designed to mimic natural coastal features, like tidepools, caves, and undercuts.

When erosion and sea-level rise threaten coastal development, we have three options: we can fight the waves with nature-destroying standard technologies, we can flee the coast and allow nature to re-engineer our shores, or we can live in harmony and allow nature to thrive even when hardened coastal protections are necessary. 

Without displacing communities, environmentally friendly engineering can increase locals’ access to marine life and living shorelines. The blue designs can inspire community stewardship of the waterfront, and encourage citizen scientists through monitoring and educational activities.

As our communities adapt to the impacts of a changing climate, we must make decisions about how we alter our environment. Let’s choose to design our shores for the benefit of people and the planet.

 

The Future of Cities: Solutions with Unreasonable Impact

4 years ago, Barclays and Unreasonable Group partnered to launch Unreasonable Impact to scale up entrepreneurial solutions that provide opportunities for thousands of jobs in sustainability, while solving some of society’s most urgent social and environmental challenges. ECOncrete® was selected from hundreds of companies across the globe to join 13 other impact leaders in the UK & Europe Unreasonable Impact Programme. 

Unreasonable companies are tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from food waste to construction strategies for the future. Some of this year’s visionaries are developing companies and services that aim to revolutionize the ways we build urban spaces.  

Our cities are home to over half of the global population. Dense urban spaces are often claimed to be a greener option than rural living, but they consume 75% of the earth’s natural resources and are responsible for over 70% of CO₂ emissions. From planning the interfaces of city edges with natural spaces to engineering the materials used in new construction, Unreasonable Impact is pushing solutions forward.

An Urban Transformation

A bird’s eye view of land, water, energy, and transportation impacts is critical to more sustainable cities. Many are giving up spread-out urban plans (known as urban sprawl) in favor of denser development with clean edges. “Dense urbanism” creates more walkable cities and leaves more land undisturbed.

Nashville Tennessee is the most sprawling city in the U.S.
Impacts of urban life extend into nature. Image from Google Earth.

San Francisco California is the second densest city in the U.S. It is constrained by water on 3 sides. Image from Google Earth.

 

Unreasonable companies are tackling environmental damage caused by our built environments, as well as harmful construction materials themselves. If it’s water consumption or construction materials, using up resources to develop our cities is creating problems for human and environmental health. Zooming in to a higher resolution, we can see that the building strategies and materials we’re using play an invaluable role in designing sustainable, or unsustainable, cities and coasts.

An Unreasonable Set of Solutions

2020 Unreasonable company Project Etopia is building modular, efficient homes that produce more energy than they use and reduce CO₂ emissions associated with construction and operation. Revolutionizing and adapting green full-scale housing means that each house uses less energy, and has a smaller carbon footprint.

Etopia modular commuter village. Image taken from pbc today.

 

Focusing on construction materials, Biohm is redesigning the materials from which we can build our homes and skyscrapers, like insulation and walls from mushroom mycelium. The benefits aren’t just structural and performance-based, they’re also positively impacting the environment by removing plastic, agricultural, and food waste from the landfill pipeline and using it to grow their building materials.

Mushroom mycelium insulation from BIOHM.

A Concrete Problem

When envisioning the cities of the future, we like to think of biking greenways and electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and vertical farms. These measures are mitigations for climate change – reducing our cities’ contributions to greenhouse gas generation. To create truly resilient cities, we must also adapt to a changing climate, and nowhere is this more urgent than where our cities interact with oceans and waterways.

Rising seas and stronger storms are causing massive damages to coastal cities every year. About 1 in 2 people on earth live in coastal regions, and as we build ports, homes, and city centers on our waterfronts, we armor them against flooding and erosion. About 70% of this infrastructure is made of concrete, and it’s replacing shallow-water ecosystems critical to healthy ocean food webs, flood protection, and improving the state of our climate.

Conventional marine mattresses (left) can be used to stabilize shorelines against erosion. ECOncrete’s articulated version (right) performs structurally, while also providing a growth point for marine life.

ECOncrete® is Unreasonable Impact’s pick to address an intractable problem. Urban coasts will continue to develop, climate change impacts like more severe storms and rising seas will make cities more vulnerable, and a loss of coastal ecosystems and biodiversity is pushing our oceans to the brink. By creating coastal defense infrastructure that makes coastal ecosystems healthier, ECOncrete® bridges the needs of our future cities to both adapt and mitigate climate change.

A Vision for Unreasonable Impact

ECOncrete’s participation in the Unreasonable Impact Program is helping push one piece of the sustainable city puzzle further into place. As ECOncrete® shifts into gear for a big scale-up, the immersive program is helping transition our positioning to better reach more ports, harbors, urban coasts, offshore wind farms, and everywhere we see concrete in and around water.

Unreasonable Impact is doing whatever it takes to help entrepreneurs like us gain the funding, network, and scalability to solve the Big Fat Problems our society faces. By creating unlikely partnerships with some of the world’s largest institutions and most admired brands, Unreasonable Impact accelerates solutions across industries, asset classes, and geographies.

In a world that’s anticipating the need to fill over 300 million jobs lost to a changing employment landscape, we have the power to create a thriving green economy across industries. There’s potential to provide over 354 million lives with careers that are doing good for people and planet. We’re thrilled to be a part of it. 

Read more about the program and mentors here. 

This eleventh Unreasonable Impact program takes place from October 12, 2020 – March 3, 2021, in a virtual environment and format.

 

Biomimicry: Nature’s Lessons for Sustainable Infrastructure

Biomimicry: Nature’s Lessons for Sustainable Infrastructure

Nature Inspires Innovations

Japan’s Shinkansen Bullet Train was one of the fastest in the world, but air pressure changes caused huge sound booms every time it exited a tunnel. The train’s shape needed a solution, and inspiration came from a bird’s beak. The Kingfisher is a predator that can dive into the water without splashing and causes so little disturbance to the surface that fish don’t know what’s coming.

Here’s another example. Tsunami detection systems can be unreliable under noisy or harsh marine conditions, causing less accurate alerts. Looking for more effective ways to warn coastal towns, EvoLogics studied the physics of dolphin communication for eight years, and learned how to develop accurate and far-reaching signals from the masters of underwater communication, dolphins. 

This is the philosophy of biomimicry: using nature’s strategies, forms, and materials to solve humanity’s design challenges. Biomimicry can take many paths: sometimes only the physical structure is based on natural shapes and features, like for the Shinkansen Train, or only a specific feature, like for the tsunami detection device. But if we look closely enough at the natural systems with which our designs and engineered structures interact, we can move beyond mimicking forms or features, to also emulating functionality, chemistry, and the benefits natural ecosystem services provide to humans all at the same time.

Is the Solution Already in Nature?

Over 50 percent of the world’s population is concentrated along coastal areas, putting severe stress on natural ecosystems as they are inevitably developed. Climate change is causing more extreme threats, like stronger storms and sea-level rise, so coastlines around the world require multibillion-dollar development, retrofitting, and intensive maintenance.

To protect coastal communities from these threats, coastal design and engineering has created a dangerous loop: more concrete coastal protections release more CO₂ (concrete is 8% of global emissions!), leading to higher temperatures, more sea-level rise and stronger storms, and the need for more concrete on urban coasts. About 70% of coastal infrastructure is made of concrete, and the breakwaters, seawalls, and piers we have today have been designed and built with little or no consideration for marine life. This is part of the reason we’re seeing the ecological decline of urban marine environments and fish populations. But shallow-water habitats are critical ecosystems, they’re the nursing grounds and foundations of the marine food chain, and provide other services like producing oxygen, and being beautiful. 

Concrete Feedback Loop

 

Over millennia, our planet has developed natural barriers that also reduce risk and protect vulnerable coastal communities by buffering storms and protecting coastlines from severe erosion. Coral reefs, oyster reefs, mangrove forests, and rocky intertidal habitats are more than natural barriers — they’re amazing, highly productive and diverse coastal ecosystems which are nursing grounds for marine life, and huge carbon sinks.  

“Ocean health and human health are entwined. We can’t protect our coastlines while destroying fragile coastal ecosystems. This is where biomimicry can come to play: by drawing inspiration from nature and designing environmentally-sensitive coastal protections that benefit humans and marine life as one,”

Dr. Shimrit Perkol-Finkel, Former CEO & Chief Scientist at ECOncrete.

Design From and For Ecosystems

Inspired by beach rock formations, coral reefs, oyster beds, mangrove roots, and other marine habitats and life forms, ECOncrete® embodies biomimicry’s design intention: to learn from and mimic forms and processes found in nature to create regenerative solutions.

“The idea is to tweak the concrete composition, texture and design, so that structures like seawalls or armor units that make up ports, marinas and city waterfront will enhance marine flora and fauna.”

Dr. Ido Sella, CEO, ECOncrete.

ECOncrete’s Patented Win-Win solution

 

ECOncrete’s proprietary technology is based on three scientific design changes that work in synergy: 

  1. A biology-enhancing concrete admix increases the structure’s strength and seals it, creating marine optimal chemistry that allows sedentary sea life, like oysters, tube worms, tunicates, and corals to grow. 
  2. Rough surface textures mimic natural marine surfaces, allowing calcium carbonate-based organisms to encrust the concrete — storing carbon dioxide, providing a layer of bioprotection which strengthens over time, and defending from chemical erosion and scouring. 
  3. Locally-attuned 3D designs resemble natural habitats, fostering the growth of native plants and animals, while performing to industry standards and creating beautiful spaces for us humans to explore.  

All together, these three biomimetic elements transform lifeless concrete coasts into ecologically designed blue-infrastructure.

“The most simple and straightforward test for biomimetic design may simply be to see how compatible it is with all surrounding living systems, not just serving humans. ECOncrete’s solution promotes ecological diversity, is safe, and supports the life that is designed around. This design is truly well-adapted for its ecosystems, and that is what ultimately set the solution apart.”

Beth Rattner, Executive Director of The Biomimicry Institute.

ECOncrete® infrastructures mimic natural systems, enabling a diversity of life while protecting coastlines.

 

Inherently Engineered for Climate Change 

Natural ecosystems are amazing at soaking up carbon dioxide, and transforming it into the building blocks of life. Using biomimicry to design from and for our ecosystems benefits humans. Why? Because when our designs make habitats healthier, both infrastructure and ecosystems can work together to create climate change resilience. 

Biomimicry opens the door for influencers and industries to bridge development and sustainability in urban spaces. It allows decision-makers, engineers, contractors, and landscape architects to integrate innovative eco-engineering technologies while building in harmony with nature. Ports and urban waterfronts can reduce their ecological footprint, while becoming an interface for the public to interact with marine life. Cities can lessen the impacts of storm surges on their waterfronts, while providing opportunities for recreational diving around thriving shallow-water ecosystems.

Kelp growth at Port of Rotterdam, low tide.

“I am intrigued by ECOncrete’s pragmatic approach to climate adaptation. Communities around the world are facing serious flooding challenges and ECOncrete® has demonstrated it can provide greater biological value when armored sea walls are necessary.”

Deron Davis, Executive Director of The Nature Conservancy in Georgia.

Using biomimicry and the principles of restoration ecology to create habitat, shelter, and food for a diverse ecosystem of marine plants and animals, enhanced infrastructure like seawalls and breakwaters allow us to construct coastlines differently. For example, by including biomimicry’s design principals into offshore wind, we can limit damage to the seabed and benthic communities. 

Of course, it would be better to leave natural coastlines as they are. If people were to live further from the coasts, the ocean could engineer our shores, and coastal habitats would thrive. But in places where we’ve already built cities, used land reclamation, or are determined to develop further, we can utilize biomimicry to restore some of the lost ecosystem services, biodiversity, and beauty.

“Doing Well by Doing Good”

In the spirit of Ray C. Anderson’s mantra of ‘doing well by doing good,’ and after having won the Biomimicry’s 2018 Global Design Challenge for Tide Pool Armor, ECOncrete® was recently chosen as the winners of the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize®. This stamp of approval is part of ECOncrete’s journey to transform the conservative concrete and coastal construction industries. Allowing options for sustainable development and blue infrastructure empowers climate-smart choices, and a more optimistic future for our oceans. 

This year’s Ray of Hope Prize Runner-Up prize of $25,000 was awarded to Cypris Materials, a company that has mastered the science of creating structural color-producing paint colored by structure rather than with pigments or dyes.

About the Biomimicry Institute:

The Biomimicry Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2006 that empowers people to seek nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet. To advance the solution process, the Institute offers AskNature.org, a free online tool that contains strategies found in nature and examples of ways they are used in design. It also hosts a Biomimicry Global Design Challenge and Youth Design Challenge to support project-based education; a Biomimicry Launchpad program and Ray of Hope Prize®️ for entrepreneurship to bring designs to market; and connects innovators through the Global Biomimicry Network.

Adapted from ECOncrete’s collaborations with the Biomimicry Institute, Sustainable Brands, and CSRwire.

Making Offshore Wind More Sustainable

As the global offshore wind industry develops, novel eco-engineering techniques help reduce the risk of seabed habitat disruption and unlock new opportunities.

Offshore Wind Energy Below Sea Level 

Development of renewable energy such as wind and solar in an ecologically sustainable fashion is vital for the future of our planet. Offshore wind turbine capacity has been growing exponentially for three decades since the first windfarm came online in the coastal waters of Denmark during 1991. By 2019, thousands of individual offshore installations provided over 29 Gigawatts of power around the globe. 

Image Source: Global Wind Energy Council

Most of these turbines are directly attached to the seabed by concrete and metal structures at depths of up to 60 meters. Substrate degradation and changes to hydrodynamic flow regimes due to poorly designed foundations can lead to local ecosystem destruction and the proliferation of invasive and nuisance species. This has widespread impact, not only on general biodiversity but also on local fishing industries. If offshore wind energy is to be truly sustainable in the long run, the use of ecological materials and nature-inspired design should become the standard. 

Sustainable development requires long-term thinking 

The long-term ecological impact of offshore wind installations has been hard to assess since no wind turbines have ever been decommissioned. With an expected operational lifespan of 20 – 25 years and an estimated additional 60 years for foundations like monopiles and gravity bases, ecosystems are clearly worth considering. The base and tower constitute roughly 80% of total development costs and are also the main focus of environmental impact assessments. It is therefore reasonable to assume that base foundations will be refurbished and reutilized while turbine heads and blades are replaced. Subsea offshore wind-farm infrastructure could be in place for nearly two centuries. 

This realization is leading forward thinking engineers and regulators to re-evaluate how concrete and steel are being used in marine environments, both at the structural and chemical levels. By seriously addressing the way marine flora and fauna interact with the foundations’ surfaces, they aim to cultivate the growth of strong ecosystems from day one. At the leading edge of ecological engineering are positive feedback solutions created between concrete that enhances biological processes, which in turn protect and strengthen the concrete itself. 

The new standard for concrete

For every ton of ordinary Portland cement produced (the binding agent in concrete), one ton of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. Furthermore, the high alkalinity and leeching out of different components from the concrete make it unsuitable for growth of most algae and invertebrate species, the first settlers in a new ecosystem. Novel concrete additives, such as ECOncrete® Admix, encourage growth of organisms that create active carbon sinks through biocalcification and photosynthesis. Thus, a project’s carbon footprint is reduced while actually increasing concrete strength and ecosystem proliferation. 

A recent study focusing on subsea Nature Inclusive Design (Hermans et al., 2020) found ECOncrete’s scour and cable protection units (ECO Armour Block  and ECO Mats) to have higher settlement densities of oysters and other mollusks, compared to similar solutions. The report was commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality of the Netherlands and specifically focused on commercial ecological solutions for wind offshore infrastructure. Oysters are so important in this context because their exoskeletons build up biogenic reef structures that attract numerous other species (Lengkeek et al., 2017) and support complex ecosystems. 

Traditionally, concrete has been cast in unnatural geometrical shapes with extremely flat surfaces, making it very hard for organic life to grow and live on. ECOncrete® technologies have ‘broken the mold’ by scientifically designing concrete structural elements that emulate natural 3D shapes with intricate surface textures, without compromising on structural integrity and durability. 

Thinking green leads to cross-industry success

The advantages of using eco-concrete during coastal development projects are not just limited to mitigating anthropogenic environmental impact. ECOncrete’s products have now opened the window of opportunity for vast cross-functional utilization of concrete offshore infrastructure in aquaculture and sea farming. A recent collaboration between marine engineering contractor Van Oord and ECOncrete Technologies in the Dutch North Sea will incorporate ecological scour protection mats that also support local sea farming by enhancing the growth of oyster beds.  Not only do they expect to significantly reduce the base erosion maintenance, but also boost harvestable oyster produce. Other projects are focusing specifically on enhancing lobster and commercial algae growth. 

Floating wind farms don’t necessarily mean less cement

Seeking to harness stronger and steadier winds, floating turbine farms are being installed in deeper waters farther offshore. This seems like good news for the environment, as most novel anchoring technologies utilize less cement than traditional gravity anchors and clump weights. However, remote deep-sea wind farms demand much more cable to be laid on the fragile seabed and more substations to be erected. Furthermore, the required tethering creates numerous artificial surfaces that may support invasive species and ecological disruption. 

Types of foundations and moorings for offshore wind turbines. Source: aquaret.com

The concrete avoided by the lack of classic base structures is expected to be utilized many-fold by complex maintenance and protection requirements. For example, extensive scour protection for numerous cable current-abrasion prop-ups, as well as mounds and anchors will be required. Jacking up cable-intersections using grout bags, foundation grouting and repair clamp grouting will all require vast amounts of cement. By incorporating ecological concrete, instead of ordinary concrete, for all anchoring and maintenance procedures, the renewables industry can significantly reduce its overall environmental impact.

The future lies in Win-Win solutions 

The global offshore windfarm industry is expanding. As long-lived concrete base structures continue to be placed on the seabed, nature-inclusive design must become the new paradigm. By using ecological concrete, carbon footprint penalties will be avoided, stable marine ecosystems can be established, and maintenance costs due to sea current erosion (scouring), reduced. Cross industry collaborations and the transfer of knowledge between the different offshore industries is crucial for the benefit of local communities and ecosystems. 

Additional Sources:

Konstantinidis, E. & Botsaris, Pantelis. (2016). Wind turbines: current status, obstacles, trends and technologies. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. 161. 012079. 10.1088/1757-899X/161/1/012079.