Another Life: Ireland’s saltmarshes could vanish as sea level rises

It was great while it lasted – almost a week of sunshine to second-guess the start of the year.

On days of crispness and quiet on the hill, one was listening for the gossip of ravens. At sunset, postponing the usual dusk, the sun sank not into lurid clouds but sustained a full-on blaze extinguished only at the line of the sea.

In such an ingratiating interlude, little waves lapped at the shore. They returned a lot of the sand that winter surf drags out and left a soft selvedge at the edge of the tide .

The storms will be back, of course, whenever it suits the NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency of America). In the hurricane season I check its maps to see which maverick cyclone is spinning away north, perhaps to gather its remnants for the next name in Met Éireann’s whimsical lexicon.

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And now, after decades of inattention, the Government and its agencies are taking really seriously the threats of storms and surges of climate change. It’s most of 20 years since I first wrote about Integrated Coastal Zone Management, the national policy urged by the EU.

Ireland's leading authority on likely sea-level impact has been Dr Robert Devoy, professor of geography at UCC's Coastal and Marine Resources Centre. On the immediate future, he was relatively reassuring. Much of our coast, as he described, already has high resilience, conditioned to extremes of big tides, frequent storms and heavy rainfall.

Clear dismay

Devoy's key paper of 2008 was written, however, without the input of later and dramatically changing sea level scenarios. But it showed clear dismay at the lack of national readiness for coastal change. The feeling is shared also by many local authorities. Mayo County Council, with the longest coastline in Ireland, is forthright on its current website: "There is no over-arching national coastal management policy to provide any steer for management."

But last autumn saw some promising movement: the first meeting of a new National Coastal Change Management Strategy Steering Group. Drawn from five departments, with the Office of Public Works (OPW), Met Éireann and local government representatives, it has six months to make a first report to Darragh O'Brien, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

As TD for Dublin Fingal, O’Brien says he understood “the grave challenges” of the group’s work, “coming from a constituency which has been, and continues to be, greatly impacted by coastal erosion.”

So the message has come home. And at the same time, in Brandon Bay on the north of the Dingle Peninsula, a yellow "smart" buoy a metre across and a trio of time-lapse cameras are ready to measure the assault of storms and the impact of rising sea levels on one of the longest sandy beaches in Ireland.

This is the "Waverider" programme, led by coastal and ocean scientists in NUI Galway and the Marine Institute. The anchored, hi-tech Brandon buoy supplied by the Sustainable Energy Authority is the first of a long-term coastal network to provide the new steering group with baseline and modelling data.

That storms claw at Ireland’s soft shores needs no proving. They have already remodelled the contours of many western bays and dune systems. So what more do we need to know?

At the fringe of a changing ocean, the Brandon buoy will, it’s said, map the character of different storms and the height and behaviour of waves. As surf surges up to the foot of the dunes, three shoreline cameras funded by the Geological Survey will capture images every 10 minutes. Their daytime record of the beach will continue for the whole of 2021.

Research

The research array at Brandon is supported by the nearby Maharees community and its electronic base station is installed in a local family home.

Modelling from Waverider will be tested against rising sea level scenarios used by the OPW. A conservative mid-range scenario sees a rise of half a metre by the end of the century; a “high end” scenario takes the rise to 1.05 metres. Last year, the Geological Survey produced a map of flooding in Dublin; it’s a worst-case scenario: a 1.9 metre rise by the year 2100.

Data from the new coastal buoys and cameras will help forecast the rates of retreat of soft shorelines and of potential damage to coastal towns and infrastructure.

Already, the lack of policy for “managed realignment” is deplored in recent studies of Ireland’s 250 saltmarshes. Tucked away in the estuaries and indentations of the coast, notably in the west, these soft, watery fringes of the land are rich plant habitats and sinks for carbon. Without a managed landward migration, many will vanish in a “coastal squeeze” as sea level rises.

Finding this a problem at a time of cataclysmic threats to coastal cities is to feel the parallel realities in today’s applications of science.