Britain’s crumbling coastline

What's so radical about the options?
The idea that Britain should effectively admit defeat in its battle to preserve coastal defences and let the sea take over large areas of the country. The most startling expression of this, appearing in a leaked report from the environment quango, Natural England, relates to a sweep of the Norfolk coast between the seaside villages of Eccles and Winterton. The report considers four options for dealing with the rising sea, and concludes that the most cost-effective long-term solution would be to allow the nine miles of sea defences protecting this stretch of coast ("unsustainable" beyond the next 20 to 50 years, in the report's words) to collapse. If that happened the sea would move in and flood 25 square miles of Broadland to create a new estuarine bay. Two new "retreated" sea walls would then be erected further back from the original coastline as a new line of defence.

Who and what would be the casualty of such a plan?
An eighth of the Norfolk Broads national park (1.2% of the county) would effectively be wiped off the map, reverting to estuary and salt marsh. Six villages, 600 homes, five medieval churches, historic windmills, five freshwater lakes (including the popular Hickling Broad) and their fish stocks, about 2,500 acres of National Trust property, and much valuable farmland would all be inundated. A millennium of history would vanish under the sea: the village of Hickling, for example, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Norfolk villagers, facing the prospect of becoming Britain's first climate change refugees, are up in arms.

But will the plan actually go ahead?
The minister in charge of flood defences, Phil Woolas, last week insisted there was "no question" of surrendering this part of the coastline; and the Environment Agency (EA) has pledged to "hold the line" in Norfolk for the next 50 years. But Woolas added that it was "simply not possible" to protect every part of Britain's coast at risk of erosion. "One can never talk about not abandoning areas if it's nature that's the problem."

And how is "nature" the problem?
In several ways, erosion being the most obvious: for centuries, East Anglia has been whittled away by the sea. The whole of southeast England is also affected by a tectonic tilt that began with the disappearance of the