Manage coastal erosion through 'conservation credits'

Luke Walsh in edie.net: A stretch of Suffolk and Essex coastline could be transformed into grazing and sea marches as part of a managed way to tackle rising sea levels. Plans put forward by the Environment Bank and Environment Agency would see businesses pay to offset their green impacts, with the funding used to manage coastal areas.

For the past four years, the Environment Bank has been refining a delivery model for the UK in consultation with central government, NGO's, developers, landowners, farmers and local authorities. Now the Shell Foundation has agreed to provide funding and internal expertise for the next year to allow a trial scheme to go-ahead.

…The scheme will in effect create a new market mechanism to enable sea levels to rise in a managed way, with the current site serving as a pilot. Environment Bank chairman, David Hill, said: "Creating markets for ecosystem goods and services should stop the environment being treated as a non-replenishing extractive industry.

"The model we have developed, together with the trading infrastructure we are constructing, will be capable of listing, registering and validating credits in respect of the full range of emerging markets for ecosystem services."…

Suffolk coast and Heaths Path, shot by Keith Evans, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license