How the humble oyster can help protect Staten Island from flooding
Faced with rising seas and stronger storms, coastal communities such as Staten Island, NY have come up with a pearl of an idea… Use recycled oyster shells as infrastructure.
Eat an oyster, help save an island. Staten Island officials are hoping it will be just that simple. Water has been eating away at the island for decades. Many areas average more than a foot of erosion a year. But the solution could come from the very same water that threatens Staten Island.
Enter the oyster. The bivalves are being used in a $107 million restoration project called Living Breakwaters. Restaurants are donating discarded shells which are used to create recycled oyster reefs. The reefs are then placed on breakwaters before they’re partially submerged.
The New York-New Jersey metropolitan region used to be the oyster capital of the world, with thousands of acres of reefs and wetlands ringing the harbor. But not any more.
“The relationship we’ve built with our environment since has removed many of these natural buffers from our coasts and waterways that historically benefited people and wildlife alike,” said Kate Boicourt, Environmental Defense Fund’s Director of Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds for New York and New Jersey. “As we adapt to a changing climate, restoring these natural resources as part of the solution can begin to repair these damages and reap multiple benefits in the form of habitat, clean air and water, cooling, and reducing the impacts of extreme storms and flooding.”
Bring back the oysters and the benefits that come with them.
It all starts with shells. Oysters are born without them. At about three weeks old, they start looking for a hard surface to latch onto while their shells grow. Other oyster shells are an ideal spot. After settling in, the young oysters continue to grow and over time a reef forms. This growth means the reefs are future proof, critical in places like New York where the coast faces up to 30 inches of sea level rise by the 2050s.
“These living shorelines... grow vertically as sea levels rise,” said Kimberly Davis Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, which operates one of the largest oyster shell recycling programs in the country.
Rising seas and angrier, more powerful storms are part of a new climate reality New Orleans deals with every day. Up until the late 1800s, a 100-mile stretch of Louisiana’s coast was flanked by a huge oyster reef. Over the years, human activity such as oil and gas exploration and the mining of shells for construction, led to its destruction.
In 2014, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana set out to rebuild parts of the reef.
“We’ve seen a significant slowing in coastal erosion in places where we have deployed oyster reefs,” said Davis Reyher. "They are having a real, measurable impact as we adapt to a changing climate." The Coalition's next reef is planned for Barataria Bay, an area devastated by Hurricane Ida in 2021.
Conservationists are increasingly employing natural solutions such as oyster reefs, mangrove restoration and other 'green infrastructure' to boost coastal resilience in the face of a changing climate.
"Living Breakwaters demonstrates how natural infrastructure can be funded, permitted, and implemented at an impactful scale," said Kate Orff founding principal of SCAPE, the firm behind the project. "We have all the tools we need to build back ecosystems — marshes, coral reefs, mangrove forests, expanded riverbanks — that can buffer us from the climate impacts of today and tomorrow. Now is the time to look upstream at the policy and funding frameworks that will allow us to accelerate adaptation."
Video: Rebuilding oyster reefs makes good business sense in Louisiana