Building Community Resilience on a Dynamic Coast by Making Space for Sand

The Making Space for Sand project is one of 25 projects funded by Defra as part of the £150 million Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme.  The projects will drive innovation in flood defence and coastal community resilience and adaptation to a changing climate.

The project is about how we can use sand dunes as a natural defence against flooding and coastal erosion caused by bigger, stronger and more frequent storm events.  Dunes also will play part in protecting us from predicted sea level rise due to climate change in the future.

Through partner organisations, the project will be collecting information about the state and ecology of the dunes to identify what can be done to enable them to grow, thrive and roll back.  It will also collect data about dune dynamics and images to show how beaches and dunes used to look, what they look like now and provide modelling for what they might look like in the future.

This data will then be shared with communities and hopefully encourage volunteers and community groups to help build and protect health dune systems and also support coastal communities to develop resilience and adaptation plans to protect themselves against future flooding events.

Watch the video to find out more about the Making Space for Sand project and who the partners are.

As the engagement partner, CCFF are helping to guide vulnerable coastal communities to understand what these predicted changes may mean to them and their community and support them to become more resilient to climate change through developing Community Resilience Action Briefs (CRABs) and Coastal Adaptation Plans (CAPs).

So far, CCFF have worked with Mawgan Porth, Polzeath, Widemouth, Porthtowan and Praa Sands to help them become more resilient to coastal change. These communities have been leading the way, championing their CAPs and CRABs.

Our Community Engagement video is now live. The film is a celebration of all of the hard work which our communities have put into becoming more resilient.

A huge thank you goes out to the communities who joined our sessions and welcomed interviews for the film. Your voices and stories are at the heart of this project.  We are delighted with all of the positive comments around how the project has provided support and guidance to these communities to strengthen their resilience to climate change, sea level rise, flooding and storm events.