The Humber Estuary

The Humber Estuary is important for nature conservation, with significant parts of the estuary designated as a Special Protection Area (SPA) under the Birds Directive and as an internationally important wetland site under the Ramsar Convention, and the remainder of the intertidal foreshore and some of the adjacent North Sea coastline identified as a potential SPA and proposed as a Ramsar site. The estuary itself has been identified as a possible Special Area of Conservation (pSAC) under the Habitats Directive.

Sites designated under the Birds and Habitats Directives are collectively termed ‘Natura 2000’ sites. The directives, which are implemented in the UK principally through the Conservation (Natural Habitats etc) Regulations 1994, impose legal obligations on the UK government to protect the integrity and overall coherence of Natura 2000 sites. Maintaining flood defences beside an estuary or the open coast can result in the loss of inter-tidal habitat, either directly through the impact of maintenance or improvement works or indirectly due to the ‘coastal squeeze’ that will occur as sea levels rise if the defences are kept on their present alignment.

To compensate for these losses large areas of the estuary have been identified for coastal realignment. This is a process by which the flood defences are removed from there present position and the estuary is allowed to reclaim the land.