Project overview

Our project, entitled Living Coasts, will explore how coastline redevelopment can reshape human-marine relations in Ireland through an interdisciplinary approach weaving together natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and with co-participatory methods involving key stakeholders.

Living Coasts addresses three key challenges facing Irish coastlines:

• Urbanisation and habitat loss: urbanisation has led to the 'artificialisation' of coastlines, replacing natural habitats like saltmarshes, sandy beaches, and rocky shores with hard, engineered structures such as seawalls, breakwaters, and rock armour. While these structures mitigate climate change-related impacts, they contribute to biodiversity loss by creating environments that support limited flora and fauna. Urban shorelines thus often lack 'space for nature' and fail to support the ecological diversity necessary for sustaining healthy ecosystems.
• Carbon tunnel vision in sustainability initiatives: sustainability initiatives often prioritise climate change mitigation through carbon dioxide reduction, a phenomena referred to as 'carbon tunnel vision,' neglecting the ecological and socio-cultural dimensions of coastal and aquatic spaces.
• Ethical and political dimensions of sustainability: achieving sustainable urban coastlines requires addressing the evolving ethical and political relations between human society and the marine environment. Increasing pressures to utilise oceanic space for homes, underwater data centers, mariculture, energy and communication infrastructures, and marine protected areas create landscapes and seascapes fraught with potential conflict, contestation, and further inequalities.

Aims and objectives

Addressing these three key challenges, the overarching aim of Living Coasts is to examine human-marine relations along urban coastlines as shared multispecies habitats, exploring how sustainable redevelopment can enhance ecological awareness, and foster novel ethical and political relations among local communities.

Under this aim, the project has three intertwined objectives:

• First, Living Coasts will assess how and to what extent the Living Seawalls contribute to the marine ecosystem and organisms in these waters.
• Second, as the Living Seawalls will be visible to the public, Living Coasts aims to understand the attitudes and perceptions of the local communities towards Living Seawalls and how this may affect their relationships to and understandings of urban coastlines.
• Third, Living Coasts will also explore with local partners and communities the creative possibilities affored by Living Seawalls for imagining shared coastal futures as well as addressing national and global challenges presented by climate change and biodiversity loss.

Through these objectives, Living Coasts will open up new research horizons on coastal redevelopment and urban-marine relations for thriving multispecies communities.