Rising Seas: Ensuring Coastline Resiliency in Halifax

With climate change, extreme rise in water levels is dramatically impacting coastlines through erosion and submersion. With continual land loss, property damage, and projected retreat of entire cities, populations and their respective economies are facing serious pressures. Typical contemporary strategies tend to favour the implementation of heavy infrastructure, such as seawalls. These strategies, however, are static, have low ecological value, high maintenance costs, and cause damage to neighbouring areas. A landscape ecology approach using hybrid or living shoreline techniques, can provide a less intrusive, more economically viable, and ultimately, a more engaging solution. 

As a means to highlight landscape ecology approaches to, not only the planning against sea level rise, but also to the protection from subsequent storm surges, the site of Halifax Harbour was selected. 

The goal of this project is to minimize the impacts of sea level rise by establishing adaptable shoreline strategies that help to absorb the energy of storm surges before they come into contact with populated urban areas. The most effective way to ensure this is through the establishment of a performative park system that engages visitors and ultimately ensures the social, economic, and ecological resiliency of Halifax Harbour. The existing park system is quite fragmented, and occupies little space along the water’s edge, providing great opportunity for landscape architecture to emerge as a performative, protective barrier between land and sea.