But the need to save money and concentrate on averting the threat to towns has found support in the scientific community and in the British love of the natural world. Salt marshes and inter-tidal mud flats in estuaries support two million wildfowl and wading birds in winter and are home to rare and specialised plants and animals. Coastal wetlands provide a vital source of food and shelter for commercially exploited fish and shellfish. The mud and plants also digest pesticides, nutrients and other pollutants that would otherwise damage the environment. But they all are fast disappearing.

In Essex one of the first projects to let the sea back onto farmland, at Abbots Hall at Salcott Creek, took three years to gain acceptance. It needed 32 separate planning permissions and licences, as well as the consent of the farmers and the oyster fishermen who feared mud would interfere with their oyster beds. Elliot Morley, the Minister responsible for sea defences, interviewed on the BBC/Open University TV programme "Flooded Britain" concedes the issue is so sensitive that he calls the process not coastal retreat but "managed realignment." He believes that the future will see "unsustainable defences being replaced by managed realignment." Farmers will graze cattle on salt marshes and sell premium local beef, rather than grow wheat, and Essex will become a Mecca for tourists looking at the wildlife, he claims.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) say these projects will be needed on a large scale if existing salt marshes are to be replaced as the sea drowns existing ones and washes them away. Already there are schemes to replace salt marches, four in Essex, one each in Devon and Somerset and in the Cromarty Firth in Scotland. Six more are planned. But the RSPB and the Environment Agency estimate 10,000 hectares of farmland will have to be abandoned to the sea in the next 15 years to keep pace with the encroaching tide.