Nature-Based Solutions Combat Coastal Erosion in San Pedro

Residents and business owners in San Pedro are raising urgent concerns about worsening coastal erosion along the beachfront of the island. According to residents, parts of the beachside have already disappeared, forcing people to navigate a narrow and hazardous pathway. Community members also point to mounting garbage and a lack of municipal cleanup, claiming the situation has created risks for children, workers, and visitors alike. So, what is the town council doing to address these concerns? Today, we spoke with Valentine Rosado, Science Advisor to the San Pedro Town Council, who shared more details on the sand replenishment project currently underway.

 

Valentine Rosado, Science Advisor, San Pedro Town Council

“Primarily in the high school area we had a storm event, and erosion has been taking the place there for twenty, thirty years, who knows how long. And during that time, a storm event eroded. But that the street was impossible and the road had to be closed. So there were some ideas floating around in that time. And one of the main one was using the white marl to fill the beach. And it seems like the most feasible idea using rocks, using sea walls. And at that point, I came across the science that we can actually nourish the beach and keep the beach right? When you use materials like that, then you lose the beach because you gain area. But at the same time we have a site called Boca Del Rio where they use white mal. And we did gain the space, but you cannot walk there because it’s not a sandy beach anymore. It’s just like very hard, solid rocks. And then the science is available to demonstrate that we can restore our beaches using nature-based restoration. So we set up a demonstration site there in 2022 and we showed how we can nourish the beach and track the sediments as a move along the shoreline. So there’s a lot of awareness that needs to happen with this because people begin to feel that if we put the sand there, then the beach is just automatically gonna appear and stay there. And that’s not the case. So we’re actually demonstrating that the sand moves and we confirm there once we monitor for two years, that the sand moves about two hundred and twenty feet towards South, right? So even though the sand is moving, what we are really doing is restoring the natural processes of the beach where the sediments come and go.  And most importantly, reintroducing the native plant species. Because the native supplant species, their function in nature is to stabilize the beach. So by introducing these, we had a mix of methods. We have some that have some stakes. We had a geotextile, we have some where we have the plants called the sea parslin, which are like vines. And just by having these vines, they’re able to call that section of the beach back. So it’s confirmation that by reintroducing the plants, we can actually enhance the resilience of the beach.”