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The
tide turns
Rising sea Levels
Risks to homes and land
Risks to habitats
Rising
Sea Levels
Communities throughout the Broads are at risk of flooding
as climate change makes its mark on East Anglia through rising
sea levels and changing rainfall patterns. Officially, the
government predicts that sea levels will rise by 6mm a year
at Great Yarmouth, though the worst case scenario predicts
a 80cm rise over 50 years. Large parts of the Broads are below
sea level, and have been protected from flooding over the
years through drainage, river management and flood defence.
These now provide a number of important habitats for wildlife.
Risks
to homes and land
There are currently some 240km
of floodbanks protecting the land and over 1700 properties
in the Broads. Many of these existing defences have deteriorated
through erosion or settling since they were built or last
improved, putting them at serious risk of being breached.
And there are several hundred more properties with no adequate
defence at all.
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Flooding
in the fens at Welney, near March, Cambridgeshire.
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These are being addressed through
the Broadlands Flood Alleviation Project. However, not everyone
is happy with the plans. As Henry Cator of the Norfolk and
Suffolk Local Flood Defence Committee remarked: "In Holland
this scheme would be unacceptable. It's too short term, with
only a 20-year view. Certainly the consultation process is
improving but the scheme is not serious enough about climate
change."
Risks
to habitats
The threat of sea water inundation is looming ever larger
in the horizon. Tom Bridges, an assistant warden at the RSPB
Strumpstraw reserve explained: "Winter tides are getting
bigger and bigger. During 1995 and 1996 there was a marine
water surge which flooded the meadows and effected the water
soldier (rare plant) and dragonflies.
"Sea level rises are only part
of picture. A year-on-year increase in demand for water has
been draining the Broads of its sources. As Paul Bradford
from the Environment Agency explained: "The Broads and
rivers are tidally influenced, and during a high tide, salt
gets into the system. When abstraction of water for public
use or farming has been high, there is not enough fresh water
to push the salt water back again."
Clive Doarks of English Nature feels
that at some point in the future, tricky decisions will have
to be made about what sort of habitat we want. "Clearly
the Broads was an estuary system before it was embanked, and
in fact part of the Broads today are brackish. At some point
in the future we need to make a decision about whether to
pursue options to fight against this."
Andrea Kelly of the Broads Authority
sympathised with this view: "Nothing has been decided
about what to do about more salt water in the system, so it's
difficult to know how to manage this until a decision has
been made. In some parts, it may be simply unsustainable to
manage for a freshwater habitat, and to date we've been focusing
on more inland broads."
Many conservation organisations that
own land in the Broads recognise that in the long term much
of the land they manage for wildlife may be inundated and
lost. Many have plans to buy safer land further upstream,
and restore them to fen for wildlife.
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Marshman
Eric Edwards - the last of his kind
Habitats
Flood
Alleviation Strategy
Climate
change
Land
acquisition
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in Norfolk