Overview of the Resilient Coasts Project: Delivery of the COSTEd Asset Management Plan

This paper is an introduction to the Resilient Coasts Project funded by the Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Innovation Programme (FCIP). The project, which started in Autumn 2021, will run until March 2027, and will work alongside coastal communities and businesses to support a transition to a more climate resilient coast via tangible, measurable and sustainable changes. The project will consider new ways to evidence, plan, fund and deliver adaptative measures for at risk coastal locations - notably for soft eroding coasts.

One key deliverable is to create a Costed Asset Management Plan. This will evaluate existing coastal assets and where appropriate consider opportunities for the placement of new temporary solutions to buy time for adaptation, following a ‘Call to Arms’ in the engineering and materials design industries for new ideas. The project aims to develop affordable asset decommissioning approaches that can support naturalisation of the coast to support No Active Intervention/Managed Realignment (NAI/MR) policies on eroding frontages and build nature-based solutions into our portfolio of coastal management options which currently do not exist for soft-eroding coasts.

East Suffolk Council (ESC) is the lead authority for the project, working with delivery partners Great Yarmouth Borough Council (GYBC), Coastal Partnership East (CPE) and Balfour Beatty (BB). The project also links to the FCIP funded Coastal Transition Accelerator projects in Norfolk and East Ridings to develop an East Coast adaptation approach.