Climping needs a proper sea defence plan

I have lived at Elmer for 33 years and walk my dogs on the beach to Climping.

I am a chartered surveyor with an honours degree in land management and a special interest in coastal zone management. I did my dissertation on the major sea defence scheme at Elmer in the early 1990s and was offered a place on an MSc coastal zone management course when it was graded.

The bottom line with coastal zone protection is a thing called a cost benefit analysis. The cost of protecting a length of coastline has to be very significantly outweighed by the quantified benefit. The benefit has to meet a multiplier to gave it any chance of it getting funding from the Environment Agency. In this way areas of coastline needing protection compete with each other for the limited funding available.

The Environment Agency gave up protecting farmland with very low housing density a long time ago as they argue the cost is not justified by the benefit.

Sea defences near Littlehampton ‘beyond economic repair’, sparking flooding fears

I suggest you Google Happisburg in Norfolk to see how a rural community is abandoned and washed away.

A programme of managed retreat should have been put in place years ago to stop this fiasco. However, this requires agreement from the stakeholders involved and comes under the definition of development.

The Climping area ‘benefits’ from a historic restrictive covenant in favour of the National Trust which prevents development. Some high-quality, high-value residential or marina-type development in the area would make the land worth saving!

Climping requires a proper multi-point action plan, with managed retreat with environmental enrichment such as a salt marsh nature reserve – look at what they did at Selsey with RSPB Medmerry and some low-impact, high-value redevelopment.

This will require all the stakeholders to sit down and reach a consensus.

The Environment Agency may benefit from the flooding softening the stakeholders’ attitudes.

The bottom line is the long-term maintenance of the existing coastline in areas of farmland with low house numbers is not sustainable.

Tough decisions need to be made now before the situation gets worse.