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About the ANCODE project
The Pearl River Delta in the South China Sea is densely populated and fast-developing; home to 67 million people, it is the most urbanised delta in the world. As it is very low-lying, cities here, like Guangzhou, are most vulnerable to sea level rise.
ANCODE aims to better understand the potential for re-introducing nature-based coastal defences, namely mangroves and oyster reefs, into such an environment.
Nature-based coastal defence solutions have increasingly been recognised as more sustainable alternatives to conventional hard engineering approaches against climate change.
Our approach
Using wetlands, mangroves, coral and oyster reefs as a buffer zone, which can attenuate waves and, in a regime of moderate sea level rise, the sediment trapping in such zones can keep pace with sea level.
This project aims to develop process-based understanding and predictive models of ecosystem size requirements and how to create ecosystems for coastal defence, using the world’s largest urban area, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China, as a model system.
How nature-based coastal defences work
The Team
Dr Judith Wolf, Principal investigator
National Oceanography Centre
Dr Zhan Hu, Principal Investigator
Sun Yat-Sen University
