What Winning a Green Heart Hero Award Means For My Community
Earlier this year, I won a Green Heart Hero Award from The Climate Coalition in recognition of my work helping to protect Mersea Harbour from the effects of climate change. Alongside other volunteers in my community, I’ve spent the last three years witnessing how storms and rising sea levels are eroding our precious harbour — and doing everything I can to protect this fragile and rare saltmarsh for future generations to come.
As the harbour continued to erode, the evidence only became stronger: Without urgent and decisive action, our much loved harbour would wash away within the next 70 years. My community wasn’t about to sit back and watch this happen though, and people from across the area — from concerned citizens to oystermen and fishermen to sailors — joined forces with the RSPB, Essex Wildlife Trust, and the Environment Agency to establish the Mersea Harbour Protection Trust.
Three years of hard work on, we’ve now successfully utilised local skills and knowledge to devise a solution that will help to mitigate the effects of climate change on the harbour and slow down the ever present erosion. By importing gravel and sand dredgings from the nearby commercial ports of Harwich and Felixstowe, we are planning on creating new offshore beaches that will help to protect the muddy islands and peninsulas that provide natural protection to the harbour.
Mersea Harbour is the beating heart of our community and saving it means protecting our homes, economy, and wildlife.
The harbour employs some 80 full time jobs, features 40 homes, and provides flood protection to 300 hectares of internationally recognised wetland bird reserves. It is additionally the breeding ground for the native flat oyster, and is a major feeding habitat to thousands of overwintering waders and wildfowl and provides a summer nesting home to birds such as the endangered Little Tern. Once built, the new beaches will provide ideal conditions for these amazing birds and help their numbers to flourish.
With huge help from Essex County Council and our local MP Bernard Jenkin, we’ve already raised £80,000 to undertake the initial investigations and pay for the consents needed from Government regulators. But our work isn’t done yet: While we wait for the Harwich Haven Authority to carry out their works that will raise the material for the new beaches, we still have £350,000 left to raise to carry out the work and monitor its impacts.
Winning a Green Heart Hero Award has helped enormously in this final phase by raising the profile and importance of our work, and as we near our donation goal we are aiming to construct these vital beaches as soon as 2021.
When I accepted the award in Speakers House of Parliament in London, I had no idea that I’d even been nominated — but I could not have been more thrilled to accept it on behalf of each and every volunteer who has poured their heart, time, and skills into combatting the impacts of climate change on our community.
The recognition from The Climate Coalition seemed a pretty fabulous “thank you!”
Written by Mark Dixon, of the Mersea Harbour Protection Trust.
If you’ve been inspired by an individual in your community going above and beyond to tackle climate change, why not give them the recognition they deserve by nominating them for a Green Heart Hero Award? There are a range of categories open for nomination, and submissions close on the 3rd December.
