Making Waves: A conservative plan for nature-based coastal renewal and resilience
- Conservative Environment Network
- Aug 3
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 13

Introduction: An island nation at a crossroads
We are an island nation. The tides that shape our shores have defined our national story too. The docks of London once welcomed a bounty of treasures from around the world. The harbours of Cornwall and Grimsby teemed with fishing boats filled with the catch of the day. The fortifications around Dover and Orkney stood as Britain’s first lines of defence against enemies from overseas. Generations of tourists have braced chilling winds as they saunter down the piers of Blackpool and Skegness to take in the fresh salt air. Britain’s coastlines have long been central to our economy, our security, and our identity.
Today, our coastal communities face growing environmental and economic pressures. Waves threaten to flood our streets, wash away our heritage, and undermine the communities that have long stood as the beating heart of our coastal economy. Storm surges batter ancient harbours, cliffs are collapsing into the sea, and, below the waves, once-rich fishing grounds are diminishing. Many coastal economies are in long-term decline, with over two-thirds of English coastal towns falling within the highest bracket of income deprivation. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and decades of underinvestment have left many of these communities vulnerable.
And yet, just as our maritime history is one of innovation and adaptation, so too can be our response to today’s challenges. This is both a patriotic and pragmatic mission and one that is rooted in conservative values: stewardship, enterprise, and national resilience. Through nature restoration, we have an opportunity not only to defend our shores but to revive our coastal economies. We must seize it.
The problem
Environmental vulnerability
Climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is changing UK shores at a faster rate than at any time in living memory.
Storm surges are more frequent and intense, sea levels are rising, and coastal erosion is accelerating. Entire stretches of our shoreline are being lost to the sea at an unprecedented rate. For communities on the front line, this means some homes disappearing entirely, with 3,500 properties in England alone at risk by 2055. More than half a million properties are at risk of coastal flooding. This may increase to 1.5 million by the 2080s. Houses are not the only buildings at risk. Hospitals, schools, and other amenities will be affected. Roads and railways risk collapsing into the sea and historic landfills opened up into the sea. The cost of managing these risks will skyrocket, putting pressure on already constrained government budgets.
Crucially, nature’s first line of defence has been stripped away, with the UK having lost around 85% of its saltmarshes and 92% of its seagrass meadows. Saltmarshes, sand dunes, and wetlands have been claimed for agricultural use, housing development, and infrastructure. Out at sea, industries have damaged the seabed and harmed marine ecosystems. Intact, these habitats act as natural flood barriers by absorbing a wave’s energy. They are critical habitats that once buffered our shorelines against storms and tidal surges.
Nature has historically helped protect our coasts. Habitats like wetlands, dunes, kelp forests, and seagrass meadows absorb wave energy, provide habitats for native marine flora and fauna, and store vast amounts of carbon. We have stripped these natural defences away.
Instead, government spending has overwhelmingly favoured traditional, concrete-based sea defences, with over 263,000 assets, like sea walls and groynes, now lining England’s coast. These assets are expensive, carbon-intensive, and often counterproductive, as they reflect wave energy onto other vulnerable areas, worsening coastal erosion elsewhere. With rising sea levels projected to impact around 20% of England’s coastal defences by 2100, this approach is increasingly untenable.

Economic decline
Currently, 67% of English coastal towns are in the ONS higher income deprivation category, compared with just 36% of non-coastal towns. These communities often face unique socio-demographic challenges in the form of ageing populations, crumbling infrastructure, reliance on precarious, seasonal industries like tourism, and outmigration of young people due to limited career opportunities.
Fishing remains culturally and economically significant in a small number of places, but many coastal areas lack a substantial fishing sector. One-size-fits-all approaches, especially those focused solely on fisheries, fail to deliver meaningful regeneration of coastal communities.
National policies have lacked a long-term and specific vision for coastal communities. While regeneration funds offer some short-term relief, they are too rarely aligned with local priorities or environmental and economic realities. They cannot build the sustained investment, nor economic and environmental resilience, that our coastal communities now desperately need.
For coastal communities, nature restoration represents a new economic opportunity to be seized. Unfortunately, the businesses trying to drive this (for example kelp farming and oyster bed restoration) face the same licensing and permitting burdens as environmentally destructive companies. Multiple agencies, costly delays, and conflicting rules hinder the emergence of new industries which could help restore ecosystems and generate jobs.
Equally, new investment vehicles, such as the creation of so-called blue carbon codes (covering habitats such as seagrass, saltmarsh and kelp) that businesses can invest into, have been slow to emerge from government. These codes can boost investment in blue carbon, but they require decisive and proactive action from the government in order to get going, granting businesses the confidence they need.
Nature can be part of the solution
Nature-based solutions offer valuable tools for both coastal protection and economic renewal. Restoring marine and coastal ecosystems can reduce flood risk and erosion, enhance biodiversity, allow fish stocks to replenish, and create new jobs, industries, and investment through marine restoration, aquaculture, and eco-tourism.
While these approaches cannot fully resolve the long-term challenges posed by climate change and structural economic deprivation on their own, they can play a vital role within a broader strategy to deliver tangible, place-based benefits that build resilience of coastal communities over time.
To unlock this potential, we propose four policy recommendations grouped under the twin aims of protect and prosper.
Protect
Saltmarshes, sand dunes, kelp forests, and seagrass meadows shielded our shores for centuries. But decades of degradation to these habitats have left us dangerously exposed and our reliance on concrete alone is proving insufficient.
To safeguard our coastal communities, we must restore these natural assets that once protected them. That means bold action to recover marine habitats and end the destruction still happening in areas we claim to protect. This is a mission of stewardship and national security: defending our coastline by rebuilding its natural foundations.
Strengthen our marine protections
An MPA is a designated area of the marine or coastal environment devoted to protecting specific marine flora or fauna from human activities. In doing so, MPAs create space for depleted fish stocks to recover.
Currently, destructive practices like bottom trawling are allowed to occur within around 92% of the UK’s MPAs. This undermines their very purpose. By dragging heavy nets along the seafloor, practices like bottom trawling release carbon from the seabed, disrupt fish nurseries, and destroy habitats. And yet, just 6% of suspected bottom trawling is actually carried out by UK vessels, whilst a quarter of this damaging activity is suspected to be done by just ten vessels, none of which are from the UK.
Brexit gave the UK new powers to control these activities. The Fisheries Act 2020 enabled the Marine Management Organisation to restrict destructive practices, a power which has already been used in 13 offshore MPAs. In order to ensure that our MPAs do what their name promises, this ban should be extended. The government has recently announced a consultation to explore doing exactly this, which follows a commitment made by the Conservatives in the Environmental Improvement Plan to do this by the end of 2024. It should make good on its commitment to ban damaging fishing practices, like bottom trawling, in more of our offshore MPAs.
But there is scope to go further. Highly protected marine areas (HPMAs), unlike MPAs, exclude all extractive and destructive activity, including commercial and recreational fishing, aquaculture, and seabed mining. These areas create true refuges where marine life can regenerate undisturbed, delivering biodiversity recovery, higher carbon capture, and resilience to climate change. These protected areas also have significant benefits for neighbouring fisheries, which will see recovery fish stock spillover into fishable waters.
So far, three English sites have been designated as HPMAs to date (Allonby Bay, Farnes Deep, and Dolphin Head), despite the government-commissioned review into HPMAs by Richard Benyon recommending at least five. This network of HPMAs should be expanded by a minimum of five additional sites in this parliament.
The designation of new HPMAs must be carefully targeted, recognising that such strict protections are not appropriate for the vast majority of our coastline. Site selection should be guided by ecological evidence and meaningful community engagement to ensure the benefits are maximised for nature and fishers, while adverse local impacts are minimised.

Use the flood defences budget to fund more nature-based solutions
Hard-engineered infrastructure such as sea walls and groynes has been the default response to coastal flooding and erosion. While clearly appropriate in many situations, we must recognise that these solutions are often expensive, carbon-intensive, and can even accelerate erosion elsewhere.
There is growing consensus that the existing approach to mitigating the risk of coastal flooding and erosion is increasingly insufficient as the threat of climate change grows. We must begin to invest public money in new and innovative solutions too, recognising the flaws of the status quo.
Natural habitats like saltmarsh, kelp forests, and dunes absorb wave energy and store carbon, offering low-cost, long-term protection. But they have been degraded and overlooked. The flood defences budget should be opened up to fund more nature-based solutions as primary defences.
These solutions help to tackle coastal flooding and erosion by harnessing natural processes that are currently missing from our marine environment. Investing in nature-based solutions isn’t just good for restoring the marine and coastal environment; they also provide habitats for our fish stocks and other marine life to thrive as well as new nature-rich spaces for coastal communities to access, admire, and leverage for new economic opportunities. These solutions are often more cost-effective, adaptive, and socially valuable than hard-engineered alternatives. By embracing them, we are restoring our coastlines and laying the groundwork for economic revival.
Despite launching a consultation which stated a renewed commitment to natural flood management approaches, and the government’s 2025 Spending Review confirming significant capital spending on flood defences, it remains unclear how much of this funding is earmarked for nature-based solutions, not to mention the growing concerns that this capital budget is not as generous as it first appears. Without dedicated support, these proven, low-carbon approaches risk being sidelined, missing a major opportunity to innovate our approach to coastal resilience.

Prosper
A vision for coastal regeneration should not be restricted to the rejuvenation of industries of the past. It should mean investing in the industries of the future. Marine restoration, aquaculture, blue carbon, marine renewable energy, and eco-tourism are not just good for our environment, they are ways of delivering economic opportunity to our coastal communities.
But today, entrepreneurs face outdated rules and missed opportunities. A pro-enterprise agenda must unlock these high-growth, low-carbon sectors and bring long-term investment to our coast. Through smarter regulation and clear market signals, we can turn our natural recovery into economic renewal.
Unlock investment by publishing the blue carbon codes
Coastal resilience is expensive. We need to unlock much more finance if we have any hope of securing the future of our shores. Public finance will be unable to shoulder all of this burden. The private sector should, therefore, be encouraged to invest in ecosystem services and the recovery of nature.
Seagrass can sequester carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, with other habitats, such as kelp forests and saltmarshes, also able to capture many tonnes of carbon. For companies seeking to balance their carbon accounts, blue carbon codes could be an exciting new investment opportunity. These codes are official frameworks which define how carbon stored in marine habitats like seagrass and saltmarsh can be measured, verified, and sold as credits. They provide investors with confidence that their money is funding real, measurable benefits, making it possible to direct private finance into marine restoration efforts.
The UK has made progress developing blue carbon codes. These frameworks can allow private investment into marine restoration projects in order to reestablish natural carbon sinks. However, these codes have faced repeated delays by successive governments.
The long-awaited carbon codes for seagrass, saltmarsh, and kelp habitats should be published as soon as possible in order to boost investment in the restoration of these blue carbon habitats. Alongside clarifying the market arrangements for trading blue carbon credits and appointing an accreditation body, publishing these codes would start to unlock private finance and create a revenue stream for local communities. This is a win for nature, coastal economies, and our efforts to tackle the impacts of climate change.
Streamline regulation for marine restoration businesses
As well as creating new vehicles through which private sector investment in our coasts can be funnelled, existing and emerging marine-based business opportunities should be freed of unnecessary red tape.
Entrepreneurs and restoration projects currently face a labyrinth of overlapping regulatory hurdles. The Solent Seascape Restoration Project exemplifies this. This project, which seeks to restore multiple ecosystems within the Solent Strait, has faced immense regulatory burdens. It will potentially require more than ten licenses including an MMO license, planning permission, and consent from the SSSI bodies, the Crown Estate, and the Environment Agency. Additionally, statutory bodies are required to provide advice, and some of these charge for their services. Unfortunately, these bodies do not work together to ensure a streamlined process. Rather, inconsistency has led to an elongated
regulatory process. Whilst large organisations or consortiums can afford to spend the time and money on licensing arrangements, these regulatory hurdles are insurmountable obstacles for many smaller businesses.
The licensing process involving the Crown Estate and Marine Management Organisation should be streamlined, with projects able to apply for a licence prior to receiving a Crown Estate lease. An existing regulator should be designated as a one-stop-shop for projects to save them having to engage and provide information to multiple different government bodies. These small changes could unlock major economic potential within coastal communities and turbocharge environmental restoration projects along our coastline.

Conclusion: Britain's coastal resilience
Restoring our marine ecosystems is no longer just a means of increasing our resilience to the impacts of climate change. It is a strategic opportunity to strengthen our economy, defend our coastlines, and revive the UK’s coastal communities.
A renewed focus on marine restoration allows us to harness the full potential of our island status. By defending our shores, investing in our natural capital, and empowering coastal enterprise, we can turn the tide not just against climate and biodiversity loss, but against decades of underinvestment and short-termism facing our coastal communities.
As our coastal and marine environments recover, they will attract new visitors - from birdwatchers in a hide watching over the sea to scientists out in the sea monitoring the progress we are making. Nature-rich coastlines offer opportunities for year-round, sustainable tourism, rather than restricting this otherwise highly seasonal industry to the summer holidays.
This is more than an environmental agenda. No British community is more than 75 miles from the sea, and our future prosperity will be tied, just as it always has been, to the health and resilience of our coasts. It is a national mission, shaped by our geography, rooted in our history, and essential to our future prosperity. This is ultimately conservatism in action: stewardship that safeguards our heritage and economic opportunities that uplift communities.
Written by Kitty Thompson and Bert Evans-Bevan,
with thanks to Sam Hall, John Flesher, and Elliott Malik.
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