The project is helping to tackle several climate change impacts, including by creating conditions for colonising species, replacing habitat lost to rising sea levels and reducing flood risk to local communities.

The RSPB’s landscape-scale habitat creation scheme on Wallasea Island has won the Environment Agency Project Excellence Award for Sustainable Resource Management.

Project Excellence Awards are awarded to projects that have been either managed or supported by the Environment Agency and demonstrate a contribution towards protecting and improving the environment for people and wildlife.

The Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project, near Rochford and Burnham-on-Crouch, is helping to tackle several climate change impacts, including by creating conditions for colonising species, replacing habitat lost to rising sea levels and reducing flood risk to local communities. The project is also moving forward the science of landscape engineering by creating intertidal habitats on the largest scale seen so far in Europe.

The project involves raising the island’s land levels using materials excavated from separate National Infrastructure Projects. The aim is to return levels on the island to those before it was claimed from the sea and allow the tide to be re-introduced to create a complex mix of biodiverse new habitats. Crucially, it will also avoid a future unmanaged breach of the site that will otherwise cause substantial damage to the adjacent Roach Estuary in the future.

The first phase of the project was created using around three million tonnes of soil excavated from the Crossrail Tunnel project. The resulting Jubilee Marsh was opened in September 2015.

ABPmer is the RSPB’s marine adviser on this project. We designed the functionality of the scheme, lead the Environmental Impact Assessment, prepared the required planning submissions and now undertake the necessary estuarine monitoring.

The RSPB is delivering the Wallasea Island Wild Coast project alongside the Environment Agency, Defra (UK Government Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs), Natural England, Crossrail, Essex County Council, Maldon District Council, Rochford District Council, Aecom, BAM Nuttall and ourselves.

Learn more about our involvement in Wallasea Island Wild Coast.