The seagrass helping to battle coastal erosion

An environmental revolution taking place on the muddy banks of Teesside's rivers and coastline

A few weeks ago I wrote about oysters being farmed in Hartlepool by the Tees Rivers Trust. At the site by the fishermen’s pontoon they’re also growing lots and lots of seagrass. Today’s edition of The Teesside Lead will be looking at that project. I was there to report on the work for the BBC World Service. You can listen to my work here, or simply read on!

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Leigh

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It was reported at the end of last week that Tees Valley Combined Authority needs to increase its funding by nearly 80 percent in order to address how understaffed mayor Ben Houchen’s office is.

Expenditure on staffing in his office is set to rise from £263,000 to £452,000 in the next financial year, if approved.

The last twelve months has seen expert local government troubleshooters brought in to right the TVCA ship. The fact they’ve quickly identified a desperate need to increase headcount - to nearly double the wage bill - exposes how under-resourced TVCA has been from the start, as well as how inexperienced in local government its senior leadership has been for it not to have identified the issue sooner.

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Blair Watson and Dr Martina Bristow planting seagrass that was grown in Hartlepool at a site in Northumberland (Image: Leigh Jones).

“This is their home! It is, it’s their home. They’re coming home!”

I’m stood at the mouth of the Wansbeck estuary in Northumberland. The temperature is -2°C, the wind is biting and it’s drizzling sideways.

Dr Martina Bristow is on her hands and knees in the sandy sediment. Her excitement is contagious.

She’s planting seagrass in a small-scale pilot to see if it can grow at this location in an effort to fight coastal erosion. I met her for the first time two days earlier in Hartlepool.

At the Tees Estuary Restoration Initiative - known as TERI for short - the Tees Rivers Trust is working to repopulate the local area with oysters and mussels, farming the shellfish in huge tanks on a piece of derelict land at the docks. Inside shipping containers, on shelves you’d have in your garage, plastic trays of water sit, with pumps whirring beneath them and bright lights above them.

In this seagrass nursery the plant is being grown from seed for different pilot projects which are attempting to regrow it around the north east coast.

Martina works on the Stronger Shores project, one of 25 projects in England to benefit from a share of government funding to explore new ways to fight flooding and coastal erosion.

The UK government expects one in four English homes will be affected by flooding due to climate change in the next 25 years, and seagrass is being explored as a possible solution.

TERI’s seagrass nursery in Hartlepool (Image: Leigh Jones).

“So back in 2024,” Martina tells me, “I went with Tees Rivers Trust to help them collect some wash up seagrass. And that’s basically pieces of the plant that have become uprooted and they’ve just washed along the shore.

“So when we collected that, we were looking for pieces of seagrass that had spades that had seeds inside so that we could collect those seeds and Tees Rivers Trust would then rot down the plant material, get those seeds out, separate them and plant them and grow them at their nursery. So it’s been growing at the nursery for just over a year now.”