Raglan's eCoast team making waves around the world

It seems fitting that a team of marine and freshwater environmental scientists should have their office perched above Raglan’s Whale Bay where the world-famous surf breaks just metres away from where they work.

Indeed, when the surf’s up, it’s unlikely anyone will be in the office at eCoast – they’re all out on the water. Or, it could be that they’re working somewhere else – anywhere, in fact, in New Zealand or around the world.

The team at eCoast is not only made up of marine scientists from around the globe, but this mighty Waikato business now works with private and public-sector clients in the likes of Vietnam and Fiji. They are, you might say, making waves around the world while studying them.

eCoast started in 2011 when six like minded scientists came together to pursure research interests and protect New Zealand's coastlines and waterways.

The team is spearheaded by Dr Shaw Mead, the managing director, with Ed Atkin, Dr Jose Borrero, Dougal Greer, Dr Tim Haggitt and Dr David Philips making up the original six.

Since 2011 they have brought in three other full-time staff, a PA and marketing manager. So, what are all these clever surfers doing out in Raglan, other than surfing?

Jose, originally from America, explained that eCoast was mainly about researching continued developmental pressure on the coastline from all different angles.

“You’ve got construction, encroachment of houses, sea levels rising, which is eroding away the coastal interface, the buffer that we had. Then you’ve got things like inland growth of cities and inland agriculture which contribute to pollutants and debris coming out to the coast.”

He said as there was more population and developmental pressure on the coastline than ever before, so protection measures are incredibly important.

Ed, originally from England, said this kind of work appealed to all of them because they’re all watermen.

“We live and breathe surfing, we dive, we go out on boats, we’re in the coastal environment consistently and we’re exposed to those elements and we see the changes.

“It’s not just being reported to us on a TV somewhere, we actually really care about our environment. The decisions we make aren’t just to get through a project. We’re making an effort conscious of the environment that we like to be in and we like our friends and family to be in as well.”

Shaw, also originally English although he grew up on Auckland’s North Shore, said the work they do often makes them wonder about the future.

“As time has gone on and you’ve been working in this environment for decades, you start to think about the impacts and if we keep on going the way we are, what is left for the future generation?”

He said eCoast believes in sustainable development.

“We try to direct our clients in that direction. You usually always come out with a win-win situation if you are looking after the environment and working within the system.

“One of the phrases we hear is people using the band-aid approach, where you just fix the symptom rather than what’s causing it. We try and work within a holistic and systematic approach to fix the cause.”

eCoast’s clientele is diverse, from councils to private companies, universities and sometimes they contract to larger international consultants for specialised work.

Work particularly close to their hearts is the international development and aid work they do for the likes of the United Nations, Secretariat of Pacific Communities (SPC), The Adaptation Fund (AF) and the Global Environment Fund (GEF). Examples of these include efforts to mitigate the effects of sea level rise on beaches and to propose sustainable development options for infrastructure investment in small-island nations. The team has worked on projects of this nature in Mauritius, Seychelles, Tonga and the Marshall Islands.

One of the things the team has been working on is a project studying and mapping surf breaks. Ed said surf science was about understanding and quantifying what makes up surf breaks, what makes them work, from underwater topography through to the waves themselves. Where do they come from? How big are they? All the components that come together.

“We are coming to the end of a three-year MBIE-funded research program. The project comes out of the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement, the amendments in 2010 got 17 breaks into the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement as nationally significant that are supposed to be protected and preserved and looked after.

“The issue was we didn’t have any information on what we were protecting. They are not static. In the ocean, you can do something in one part on the coast and it has impacts a long, long, way away.

“The things we’ve been looking at are what kind of data do you collect and how you should collect it and we’ve also put together guidelines about monitoring and managing our surf breaks of national and regional significance.”

But, Ed said, that’s just one of the things they’ve been up to lately.

“We are also developing wave pools for surf, which has become a really big thing in the last year,” Ed said.

Off the back of someone knowing Shaw’s expertise in this field, inquiries were made by a potential wave pool technology developer as to what sort of assistance could be provided.

“It also just so happens that the eCoast group, and under our previous working umbrella, have a significant amount of experience in physical modelling, but also actively pursued the development of wave pools for surfing well before they became popular – i.e. in the last 5 years.

“Our work to date is based in New Zealand and there is a working scale model (1:10) close to home,” Ed said.

But it’s not just about surf. eCoast is a coastal environmental consultancy. They do all kinds of ocean and coastal environmental related work. Surf breaks is one of them, but their work ranges from water quality research, beach protection studies, work in tsunami and earthquake research, biology and ecology, to stormwater and wastewater research.

They also constantly watch the swimabilty of the harbour in Raglan by looking at what’s flowing in from the rivers, simply because they’re interested.

Dougal, hailing from Ireland, said there had been a lot of work done in the harbour.

“A local group, Harbour Care, has worked with farmers to plant a lot of trees to stop sediment getting in and we’ve seen the sea grass returning. It’s hugely important for breeding fish. If you stop the mud coming down the river it allows the sea grass to come back and let fish, like snapper, breed. We’ve seen sea grass come back a lot over the last 10 years. That basically means nurseries for fish,” Dougal said.

Shaw said sea grass was a very good indicator of water quality.

“New Zealand was covered in trees and it rains a lot, so when you cut the trees down and plant grass, there’s nothing to knock out the energy of the rain fall and there’s no mulch and leaf litter to filter that water.

“That’s the biggest impact we’ve had on our country. What you see around most of the country is intensified dairy farming where you’ve got more than twice the number of cows on the land that you used to, so it’s not only nutrients, it’s all their footprints. They block them off until they eat all the grass and it becomes a slushy mud paddock and they go on to the next and then when it rains all that goes into our water ways.

“We just accept that that’s okay, but it shouldn’t be.

“People are seeing their waterways turn to poo, and it’s not just intensive farming, urban development and forestry are having the same kinds of impacts. It’s interesting because we are marine scientist, but we’re having to work our way up the catchment to protect the marine environment.

“We aren’t accounting for what we’re doing to the environment and if we don’t start doing that, there won’t be much left for future generations,” Shaw said.

Shaw said on top of all that they also have a regional office in Fiji where he spends a lot of time.

“A lot of that work is to do with resorts, around beach protection. A lot of them have erosion issues which are usually engineering or, over there, biological issues.”

They also do work in marinas, ports and estuaries, as well as renewable energy.

And Dougal has just won a contract for a job over in Vietnam to study a large wind farm in the intertidal zone, where they get extreme wave data for the engineers that need it.

“That project has had me hooting inside for the last 48 hours,” Ed said.

“We mix it up with the big boys. There’s a few big engineering companies out there that probably find us a little bit annoying because we do our jobs really well. We are always trying to get those big projects, just because we’re not massive doesn’t mean we can’t do them,” Ed said.

Dougal said it could actually be a bit of an advantage being smaller.

“Some of those bigger companies are a bit more lumbering and have a lot of overheads. It’s quite good being a smaller company and it doesn’t stop you doing overseas work at all.”

The team have plenty on the go in Waikato too, with the Raglan Rangitahi residential development project where they’re monitoring the water quality and sea grass growth in the area. They also keep an eye on Manu Bay’s boat ramp – that’s an ongoing project where they monitor the environmental impacts it has.

When asked why they all came to work in Raglan the group laughed and exchanged glances. Jose eventually explained: “We all surf and if you have the chance to work in a place like Raglan with waves like that, you’re not going to say no”.

If you would like to know more about eCoast visit their website here or email them at: info@ecoast.co.nz