Roger Proudfoot of the Environment Agency answers questions on the organisation’s priorities for restoration and the links to government policy. He is the convener of ReMeMaRe 2023, the UK’s leading coastal and estuarine restoration conference, which is taking place on 11 & 12 July in Scarborough.

Can you introduce yourself and your role

Roger Proudfoot, Estuary and Coast Planning manager for the Environment Agency. I am responsible for supporting the Environment Agency (EA) and our partners to improve the biological and chemical status of estuarine and coastal waters, to ensure they are protected, restored and resilient, for the benefit of people and wildlife. My team’s brief is wide ranging and includes supporting internal and external partners with advice, information, and tools to help protect and restore estuarine and coastal waters. This includes understanding the value of the blue environment, and how it can be used sustainably.

What is the ReMeMaRe initiative?

ReMeMaRe stands for Restoring Meadow, Marsh and Reef (pronounced re-memory). Its main aim is to restore key priority habitats where intervention is needed to restore long lost benefits that these habitats used to provide. The initial focus is on saltmarsh, seagrass, and oyster reef but we have ambitions to broaden our scope and consider a more seascape approach rather than focussing on single habitats. The initiative has been running for four years and includes a broad spectrum of restoration practitioners bringing together government bodies, environmental NGOs, industry, and academia under the umbrella of a shared vision and mission for restoring these important habitats. Collectively we have produced Restoration Handbooks providing practical guidance on how to restore the priority habitats, and restoration potential maps, providing guidance on existing habitats and where estuarine and coastal restoration may be most successful and beneficial. We are now looking at how we can scale up capacity to pipeline more projects on the ground.

What are the EA’s restoration priorities?

The EA, as competent authority for the Water Environment out to 1 nautical mile, and has responsibility for setting out measures to improve the ecological and chemical status of the water environment in River Basin Management Plans.

We also have responsibilities for strategic coastal defences along with Local Authority partners.

Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy Roadmap to 2026 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

ReMeMaRe is a key initiative for helping us to drive achieving good ecological status and provide coastal resilience as well as creating an overall net gain for biodiversity and delivering nature-based solutions. The initiative is cited in the Environment Improvement Plan under ‘Enhancing nature in our marine and coastal environments’. It states: ‘Defra will lead a practical initiative to restore estuarine and coastal habitats (ReMeMaRe – Restoring Meadow, Marsh and Reef), which will restore 15% of our priority habitats along the English coast by 2043’. We are also keen to explore how our work to improve the water environment in catchments contributes to creating the right conditions to allow more natural recovery of estuarine and coastal ecosystems.

Isn’t restoration too expensive and too slow?

There is no doubt that restoration can be expensive and slow particularly with inflationary pressures and increasing land prices and a regulatory regime designed to protect what we have left rather than restore what we once had, and those protections are important but we also need to enable restoration. The targets in the Environment Improvement Plan and associated legislation will help us move in that direction. No one party, either government, private or civil society should be expected to shoulder the cost as many of the historical losses can be attributed to a collective impact of multiple pressure over the last century. This makes it difficult to attribute to any one policy decision, industry or wider natural or unnatural change. Historically we have introduced regulation that has protected the benefits and uses that we currently have from the nearshore environment. However, with the threat of climate change at the coast and the biodiversity crisis, we stand to lose many of the remaining benefits our estuarine and coastal ecosystem currently provide such as natural flood protection, water quality improvement, biodiversity, fish nurseries, carbon sequestration, recreation, and health and wellbeing. Action is needed to keep pace with the inevitable change that is ahead if we are to retain and enhance these benefits and that includes enabling and accelerating restoration activity.

Apart from salt marsh, sea grass and native oyster reefs, what else are you focussing on restoring?

These habitats provide us with a sentinel focus and variously cover much of our estuarine and coastal waters, so we use them as our “sea canary in the cage”. By focussing our efforts on these high value habitats that resonate with many of the stakeholders we are working with, it enables us to promote a wider agenda of estuarine and coastal restoration. If we get it right, restoring these habitats will also be a good indicator of the wider health of our nearshore estuarine and coastal ecosystem. We are also considering kelp and other habitats where interventions are needed to remove existing pressures for them to recover.

Shouldn’t the government be paying for restoration?

Government do have a major part to play to support wider society restoring the benefits of nature across the board, and this has recently been set out through the revised Environmental Improvement Plan. Government bodies are also working on providing more hooks on which to plan for more restoration through more detailed planning processes such as Marine, River Basin Management, Shoreline Management and Fisheries Management Plans and the Plan for Water. Alongside our plans we are also collating best practice, settings standards and providing data and information to support programme and project development all of which comes at a cost. However, this does not get “spades in the ground” so a blended approach is needed where the costs and risks are shared between several partners particularly given the innovation that is needed and the uncertainty of outcomes working in a very dynamic environment. It also needs a collective buy-in at a local level to ensure success, one that is not the role of central government but more a negotiated, collective local understanding of trade-offs set in a national context and that takes account of local user needs and ambition.

How does estuarine and coastal restoration link to government policy?

The linkage is wide-ranging across many policy areas for central government and includes water environment, flood, fisheries, nature conservation as well as the Departments for Health and Social Care and Business, Energy, and Infrastructure. It is hard wired into the government’s Environmental Improvement Plan (Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)) with targets to restore nature (see page 52) as well as supporting regulatory objectives in the Plan for Water, Marine and Flood Strategies. Given the scale of the restoration challenge part of that policy agenda and associated objectives is about being ambitious and working together in bigger partnerships for maximum impact at a seascape scale. The government’s Green Finance Strategy makes it easier for investors to identify investment opportunities that are aligned with climate change and nature recovery targets; ReMeMaRe aims to make it easier to find those investment opportunities. Unleashing innovation and developing new sources of finance are also fundamental for delivering nature recovery and developing nature-based solutions to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and we are working closely with Defra on blue carbon with a focus on salt marsh which has the greatest potential to contribute to carbon storage and sequestration.

What is the aim of the ReMeMaRe 2023 conference?

Our conference is the first face-to-face conference since the pandemic and a key aim is to bring practitioners back together again to take stock where we have got to with the restoration of these critical habitats and review what progress has been made, the challenges and future opportunities. Most importantly it brings people back together, all with a shared ambition to strengthen relationships and inspire the network to continue to develop and deliver a pipeline of projects that are needed to achieve our shared vision and mission to restore saltmarsh, seagrass, and oyster reefs.

What is your vision for restoration?

We have a shared vision to restore at least 15% of our priority habitats by 2043, in line with the 25 Year Environment Plan timescale to restore marine ecosystems where practical. The Environment Improvement Plan is the first over the next 5 years in that direction.