Tinsel to tidewall: discarded Christmas trees reused to protect Lancashire coastline
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Tens of thousands of discarded Christmas trees have been partially buried on beaches south of Blackpool as a frontier against rising sea levels.
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Within weeks, or sometimes days, they morph into sand dunes to protect homes on the seafront.
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“Sand dunes used to extend for miles and miles inland but we’ve colonised and built the towns so now they’re a very thin fragment of what they used to be,” said Amy Pennington of Lancashire Wildlife Trust, which runs the sand dunes project with funding from the Environment Agency.
“They’re important because this is the only form of sea defence that the local community has.”
Volunteers began burying Christmas trees along these beaches more than three decades ago – the Guardian photographer Christopher Thomond first captured the effort in 1994 – but the project has ramped up in the past decade as sea levels have risen.
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Pennington said an increase in storm surges had accelerated the loss of sand dunes, potentially exposing coastal houses to flooding: “We’ve noticed with storm surges, the tide pushes a lot further up the beach so the dunes get washed away more regularly.”
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Pennington said the new dunes, which can grow to about 3 metres (10ft) high, should withstand the elements “hopefully indefinitely”.
But as sea levels rise, she said, they will within the next five years have to start building the dunes upwards, rather than out towards the Irish sea. “Eventually we will get to a point where the tide is regularly meeting the work we’ve done so they will just be swept away. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop building them out, we will just start building them up.”
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