North America’s first-ever Living Seawalls habitat panels installed by Stone Living Lab at two Boston Harbor sites
North America’s first Living Seawalls habitat panels were installed by the Stone Living Lab at two locations on Boston Harbor this fall. The panels are specially designed to create habitat for marine life to flourish on what would otherwise be inhospitable flood barriers.
The Condor Street Urban Wild in East Boston and Fan Pier in the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood are now home to 240 Living Seawalls panels, which mimic beneficial natural habitats like rock pools. The project is exploring how Living Seawalls panels can help increase biodiversity and abundance of ocean life, improve water quality, and potentially soften wave impact while also mitigating the environmental downsides of existing seawalls.
"Boston is proud to host North America's first-ever Living Seawalls, a groundbreaking step forward in integrating innovation with nature to protect our coastline and enhance biodiversity," said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. "As we confront the challenges of climate change, projects like this demonstrate how we can reimagine our urban waterfronts—not just as barriers against the rising seas but as vibrant ecosystems that benefit our communities and marine life alike."
The Stone Living Lab is a Boston-based research partnership led by Boston Harbor Now and the University of Massachusetts Boston, along with city, state, federal, and Indigenous partners.
“The installation of Living Seawalls panels in Boston marks a historic step in pioneering climate resilience solutions for the city,” said UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. “Indeed, the prospect of restoring marine habitat and nurturing biodiversity in Boston Harbor is both a real-time example of how innovative, imaginative research can move the world forward, and a profoundly important win in the one battle we cannot afford to lose.”
“As we look to the future of the Harborwalk, we must ‘green’ our gray infrastructure to make our waterfront more welcoming and alive,” said Boston Harbor Now President and CEO Kathy Abbott. “We are proud to help bring Living Seawalls to North America, and to catalyze collaboration around financing and facilitating more innovative coastal projects with our communities.”
Living Seawalls is a flagship program of Australia’s Sydney Institute of Marine Science and was a finalist for the 2021 Earthshot Prize, an annual award launched by Prince William and Princess Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, to search for and scale up the most innovative solutions to the world’s greatest environmental challenges.
In 2022, when the Earthshot Prize was held in Boston, the Stone Living Lab was introduced to the Living Seawalls team. Since then, the two organizations and their collaborators have conducted project planning, site selection, baseline research and monitoring, panel design, panel fabrication, permitting, educational program planning, and installation.
“We are so excited to be exploring the benefits that Living Seawalls can provide for urban waterfronts as we face the challenges related to climate change and sea-level rise,” said Joe Christo, Managing Director of the Stone Living Lab and the Chief Resilience Officer at Boston Harbor Now. “Innovative projects like this do not happen without close partnership, and we are so thankful to have many great partners on this project. We look forward to collecting real-world field observations, and collaboratively learning how Living Seawalls can complement other nature-based approaches for coastal resilience in Boston and other urban waterfronts throughout the region and country.”
Stone Living Lab researchers will perform monthly surveys of the panels and nearby control sites (areas with no panels) to observe and record the population of ocean-dwelling plants and animals over time and conduct other scientific research on the benefits and impacts of the project.
In addition to the Stone Living Lab and Living Seawalls, other project collaborators include Woods Hole Group, SumCo Eco-Contracting, the City of Boston, Boston Children’s Museum, the JFK Library Foundation, Museum of Science, The Fallon Company, and CBRE. The project is supported by the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, 11th Hour Racing, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Cabot Corporation Foundation.
Representatives from the Stone Living Lab and its collaborators gathered on Friday, November 22, 2024 at Condor Street Urban Wild in East Boston for an official launch of the project and unveiling of the new Living Seawalls installations.
"In many of our urban areas, we rely on seawalls to protect our communities. Living Seawalls are an innovative solution to incorporate elements of natural ecosystems into gray infrastructure," said Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper. "This project demonstrates the importance of our partnership with the Stone Living Lab to pilot and evaluate the incredible potential of nature-based strategies and identify strategies to increase the resilience of our coastal communities."
“The Living Seawalls project is an inspiring demonstration of how to create vital habitat while protecting our shorelines,” said Massachusetts Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer. “As sea levels rise and natural habitats are threatened, dynamic solutions that showcase the power of innovation and sustainability are essential to building resilient coastal communities.”
About the Stone Living Lab
The Stone Living Lab (SLL) is an innovative and collaborative initiative focused on testing and scaling up nature-based approaches to climate adaptation in Boston Harbor and beyond. We are a unique partnership between government agencies and nonprofits: Boston Harbor Now, UMass Boston School for the Environment, the City of Boston, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs, the National Park Service, and the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag. As a “Living Lab,” we bring research into the real world by engaging scientists and the community in collaborative design and exploration. Our work brings us not only along the coastline of Boston Harbor, but into the water itself and out among the Boston Harbor Islands and other locations. Our areas of focus are research and monitoring, education and engagement, policy innovation, and climate preparedness.
About Living Seawalls
Living Seawalls is a flagship program of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. Its habitat panels, designed to mimic natural formations like rock pools and mangrove roots, can be fitted to new or existing sea defenses like seawalls or levees. The project is a collaboration between creative designers and marine ecologists. As a result, life has found its way back to the Sydney shorelines. Sea defenses fitted with habitat panels have 36% more marine life after just two years, with further increases expected through time. Up to 115 species of invertebrates and seaweed, as well as tens of species of fish thrive among the panels. The project operates at 11 Australian locations, and it has since gone global. It now benefits shorelines in Wales, Gibraltar, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and now the United States in Boston.