A new plan to preserve Georgia’s marshes: Give them space to migrate

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

In coastal Liberty County, a creekside park nestled between the town of Midway and I-95 is losing its battle with high tide.

“If we walk that way, you’ll be able to see some of the, well, just plain erosion,” said Phil Odom, chairman of Liberty County’s Consolidated Planning Commission, on a recent afternoon. “This is how much it has collapsed. We’ve lost about six, eight feet right here.”

Decades ago, in order to build up a solid foundation for the highway, construction crews dug up earth from this spot and left a deep pit. Although the park is over 15 miles from the ocean, the tide washes up the creek and into the manmade basin twice a day. Over time, the salt water has deposited sediment in the pit, turning it into a shallow mud flat with little islands of marsh grass cropping up in the middle.

But the tide has also steadily eaten away at the land. The grasses halt abruptly where they reach the small, muddy cliff of the bank — shorn away sharply where the tide has battered it.

Local leaders like Odom are hoping to fix that erosion at the water’s edge, and they’re taking a natural approach, having learned from prior, failed attempts to address the problem. 

“We hope for it to replicate nature,” said Shannon Marino with Zulu Marine, which builds what are known as living shorelines.

Instead of putting up a wall or using chunks of concrete to hold the soil in place, the county is attempting to restore the marsh grasses that grow here naturally. Their roots will help hold the soil in place.

“When our solutions are done, you should look at it and not really recognize it as a repair or a bulkhead or a solution,” Marino said. “It should just look like nature.”

It’s an increasingly popular way to address coastal erosion in the face of rising seas. Farther down the coast in Brunswick, Zulu Marine is installing a living shoreline along a canal where high tide and an overwhelmed stormwater system regularly flood a nearby recreation path and threaten a local water supply well. While the work is underway, native marsh grasses wait in temporary transport pools; they’ll be replanted over the stabilizing mesh. 

But as sea levels rise due to climate change, protecting and replanting the existing marsh plants is only one step. Because the marshes will need to rise along with the tides. 

Georgia is home to more than a third of the connected marsh habitat along the coast of the Southeastern U.S. — hundreds of thousands of acres. The salt marsh serves as a critical buffer against storms, and it’s broadly protected under state law. 

Salt marshes by their very nature are always moving. Odom, an avid fisher, has watched Georgia’s dynamic coast change in slow motion over the last 75 years: deep salt water moving into areas that once teemed with marsh grass, marshes in new places, the tide creeping ever higher and leaving the ghostly skeletons of salt-choked trees in its wake. 

“Remember Jurassic Park, like nature can always find a way,” University of North Carolina wetland scientist Lori Sutter said. “Because of the magic of salt marshes they’re able to persist in this environment where they’re flooded twice a day, every day.”

But that magic of salt marshes only works if they have somewhere to go. Sea level rise driven by climate change is forcing marshes to move faster and farther inland. The sea level on Georgia’s coast is projected to rise one to two meters in the next 75 years. If the marshes can’t keep up, the coast will be left that much more vulnerable.

Once a migrating marsh encounters a paved road or a building, it hits a dead end. There’s nowhere for new grasses to take root, which means the rising tide can sweep in unabated, swamping the marsh and threatening manmade structures behind it that the marsh once protected. 

That’s why a new action plan by a coalition of conservation groups, scientists, government agencies, and coastal communities calls for protecting not just the salt marsh itself, but also the adjacent land. The plan from the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative has identified more than 56,000 acres of land in Georgia where marshes will likely migrate that are also currently open to development. 

“That creates this really vast area that you’re trying to conserve, which can be overwhelming,” said Courtney Reich, the coastal director for Georgia Conservancy. Her group is working with Phil Odom and the other stakeholders in Midway and Brunswick and is spearheading the Georgia work under the Initiative, which is a multi-state effort to restore and protect coastal salt marshes. 

The plan is a roadmap, not a binding policy or seizure of anyone’s land. Instead, the authors hope to help landowners and public officials make informed decisions.

“You know, do we want to build up to the edge of the water or do we want to leave room?” Reich said. 

Short-term needs often drive land use conversations, she said. This plan aims to get people thinking about the long view.

Reich and the other members of the Georgia SASMI implementation team have been meeting with coastal stakeholders, including landowners and local leaders, to educate them on the needs of the marsh and the options for conservation and policy. 

“We really do have to up our conservation game in Georgia,” she said.

That means advocating for policy change at the local and state level and also helping both local governments and private landowners undertake marsh-friendly projects. A key component of that work is compiling funding sources, drawing on what Reich called the “ecosystem” of land trusts, nonprofits, and both public and private grants. 

“We want to make sure that we support and increase their capacity to do this work in our coastal environment,” she said.