How to Get Started with Green Shores

Green Shores® is a science-based program that encourages the use of nature-based shoreline solutions to support healthy shoreline environments and provide shoreline protection for waterfront properties. Green Shores offers a framework of best practices, training, certification and technical support in applying nature-based solutions on shoreline properties.

Green Shore’s best practices are based on four guiding principles:

• Preserve or restore physical processes such as the natural actions of water and sediment movement that maintain healthy shorelines.
• Maintain or enhance habitat function and diversity along the shoreline.
• Prevent or reduce pollutants entering the aquatic environment.
• Avoid or reduce cumulative impacts. Small individual effects add up to large impacts on shoreline environments.

Green Shores nature-based solutions work with natural features of healthy shoreline ecosystems such as

• Intact riparian buffer with native vegetation
• Retention of overhanging vegetation such as large trees
• Large woody debris
• Shoreline materials (sand, cobble, gravel and rocks)
• Natural processes (sediment transport, wave action, shoreline ecology)
• And more!

Green Shores does not rely on the use of artificial structures, cement, or other foreign materials for shoreline stabilization. Instead, Green Shores uses natural materials and designs to reduce wave action and mitigate various shoreline risks worsened by climate change that are faced by waterfront homeowners, such as

• Sea-level rise
• Storm surge
• Erosion
• Flooding

Green Shores can be used by

• Homeowners, developers or managers on marine or lake shores
• Practitioners such as planners, coastal engineers, biologists, contractors
• Community planners, regulators and elected officials involved in planning, policy, and management of marine coastal and lakeshore areas