EARC Conference 2022 – Sustainable coastal ecosystems and opportunities for regional development

Venue: Hooper and Woods

Climate change is forcing coastal communities to rethink the way they manage coastal environments.

This can bring challenges but also potential opportunities, for example for capturing green (or blue) finance, opening up ecotourism, and protecting inland areas.

This session will first present one such area of opportunity, namely seaweed farming. The East of England, bordering the southern area of the North Sea, presents an as yet unexploited potential to address multiple challenges including climate change, nutrition, biodiversity and erosion. Macroalgae farming at scale has a role to play in offering solutions to the above challenges through the propensity of seaweed to fix carbon rapidly and provide biomass, rich in nutrients, that can be made into valuable products through onshore processing.

The waters of the south North Sea have been identified as a suitable environment for large scale seaweed cultivation that would not only enhance habitat for biodiversity regeneration but also offer protection against scour and coastal erosion. We see opportunities in colocated wind and seaweed farms eventually helping to meet the growing plant-based nutritional demand in the UK and elsewhere but in doing so, also supporting carbon sequestration with an environmentally positive product life cycle. 

Prof Sheng Qi (UEA) and colleagues will look at how a sustainable seaweed circular economy in the East of England can fix carbon rapidly and provide biomass, rich in nutrients, that can be made into valuable products through onshore processing. 

In the second part, we will open up the discussion to a wider set of opportunities with a panel discussion with representatives from CEFAS, UEA Low Carbon Innovation Fund, regional government, conservation charities, as well as the seaweed farming initiative. 

Further reading

Algae Innovation Platform

Return to main conference page