Building with Nature: the Dutch Sand Engine

The November 2015 Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment tackles Innovations in the face of climate change. Articles address innovations big and small, from massive technological installations like Rotterdam’s proposed next generation Dutch Windwheel to municipal planning and the individual construction and land use choices of city residents.

Four basic infrastructure types can be paired with adjacent land uses and landscapes, including urban districts and ecosystems (eg wetlands, rocky shores, sandy beaches, contaminated soils). Figure 6 from K. Hill (2015) Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The Delfland Sand Engine falls somewhere in the middle. It is large (21.5 million cubic meters of sand) and relies on a sophisticated understanding of coastline dynamics. But it is elegantly simple in design, material, and execution—essentially a big pile of sand jutting out into the North Sea, steadily eroding so that beaches down current may be replenished.

Ecologically friendly solutions to coastal protection have reached public consciousness lately as storms and sea level rise have drawn attention to the limitations of our rigid shorelines.

“Cities are emergent systems, with only 5 to 7 thousand years of history, mostly during the relative climatic stability of the Holocene,” said guest editor Kristina Hill, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. “We’ve never tried to operate a city during a rapid climate change, especially not on the scale of population we now have, with our largest cities housing upwards of 20 million people.”

Hill wants to start a cultural revolution in our relationship with natural systems, working with, rather than against, the force of tides, floods, and storms, and inviting non-human life into our living spaces. Ecosystem services have clear practical benefits. Vegetation brings cleaner air and water as cooler summer temperatures, and as well as beauty, recreational space, and habitat for our non-human neighbors into cities. Making the rhythms of natural systems visible also helps city dwellers connect with the natural world.

The Dutch Sand Engine experiment in dynamic coastline management is an artificial sand beach designed to erode. Sand pulled away from the 126-ha peninsula by wave, wind, and currents spreads along the Delfland Coast of The Netherlands, naturally nourishing a shoreline that has suffered rapid erosion. The project, a collaboration of government, private industry, and academic researchers, was completed in 2011 and is expected to maintain the shoreline for the next 20 years. The peninsula is also popular with wind and kite surfers. Guest editor Kristina reviews innovations in coastal infrastructure designed to work with storm surge, sea level rise, and other natural processes in “Coastal infrastructure: a typology for the next century of adaptation to sea-level rise,” on page 468 of the November Special Centennial Issue of ESA Frontiers.

Shoreline infrastructure in the news:

• (2016) “Ecology and designing future cities.” Earthwise radio (a collaboration of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies) 4 Jan.
• Fears, Darryl (2015) “Scientists worry that the Chesapeake’s natural shoreline is turning into a wall.” Washington Post, 26 Dec.
• Hill, K. (2015), Coastal infrastructure: a typology for the next century of adaptation to sea-level rise. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 13: 468–476. doi:10.1890/150088
• Kwok, Roberta (2015) “Rise of ‘shoreline hardening’ threatens coastal ecosystems” Conservation Magazine, 6 Aug.
• Popkin, Gabriel (2015) “Fourteen percent of U.S. coastline is covered in concrete.” Science Magazine (ScienceShot), 18 Aug.
• Popkin, Gabriel (2015) “Breaking the waves.” Science  Vol. 350, Issue 6262, pp. 756-75913. DOI: 10.1126/science.350.6262.756
• Wheeler, Timothy (2015) “Scientists find ‘armored’ shoreline hinders bay grasses, crabs.” Baltimore Sun 22 Sept.