Be Alive: Ecological shoreline design for a rapidly urbanising Bay City, Xiamen, China

As climate change continues to intensify, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent worldwide and sea level rise is becoming an irreversible trend. Even if the sea level will rise only marginally in the short term, the rise in basic water levels combined with typhoons and storm surges can easily cause severe flooding in coastal lowlands, resulting in loss of life and socio-economic damage. Xiamen’s shoreline was artificially altered and hardened, the original distance between land and sea was shortened, the area of mudflats tended to decline annually, the natural coastal landscape became fragmented, and the ecological safety of the coastal zone became an enormous challenge for the sustainable development of Xiamen. A significant part of the city‘s coastline has already been built with solid dykes and dyke walls, which in the short term can quickly meet the needs of the city‘ rapid development and disaster prevention, but in the long term such hard protection will be difficult to cope with future global climate change and sea level rise. This project aims to establish a dynamic coastal landscape for Xiamen that can adapt to climate change in the long term through ecological instruments, which will also lead to an increase of biodiversity. The restoration of marine wetland landscapes, supplemented by sea water floating bed technologies to restore and maintain local ecosystems, are the focus of this design-based research.