The Emerald Tutu envisions restoring coastlines with swaths of resilience infrastructure made from biomass and living plants.

An engineered biological system at such a scale would reduce storm-driven wave energy, provide marine habitat, and offer ecosystem benefits in the form of water quality improvements and carbon sequestration. It could also provide recreational benefits to the surrounding neighborhoods, bringing people to the waterfront and allowing them to interact with a new kind of coastline condition: inhabitable engineered ecological infrastructure.

➔  We design, prototype, deploy, and test Nature-Based Infrastructure (NBI) on the coastlines of Massachusetts and beyond, with the broader goal of developing simple methods that will allow NBI to scale up. We promote skills training for NBI installation and maintenance that will allow coastal communities to benefit economically from resilience investments.

➔  We believe that persistent hands-on work to develop these skills and techniques is the only way that vulnerable coastlines will be restored to a vibrant marshy ecosystem on any significant scale. The variety of site-responsive solutions we’ve prototyped range from living shorelines to floating units to marsh grass cultivation.