Decades ago, in order to build up a solid foundation for I-95 through Southeast Georgia, construction crews dug some earth near the town of Midway, Georgia, about 50 miles south of Savannah, and left a deep pit. There’s now a public park in that spot, bounded by a tidal creek on one side and the leftover dredge pit on the other. Although the park is over 15 miles from the ocean, high tide washes up the creek twice a day. Lush marsh grass fills the space between solid ground and the creek, but it’s a different scene along the other bank, where the salt water has steadily eaten away at the land while depositing sediment in the basin. Now, what was once a deep pit is a shallow mud flat with little islands of marsh grass cropping up in the middle, naturally moving in now that the ground is suitable for it.
But the grasses halt abruptly where they reach the small, muddy cliff of the bank — shorn away sharply where the tide has battered it.
“If we walk that way, you’ll be able to see some of the, well, just plain erosion,” said Phil Odom, chairman of Liberty County’s Consolidated Planning Commission, on a recent afternoon. “This is how much it has collapsed. We’ve lost about six, eight feet right here.”
Local leaders are hoping to fix that erosion at the water’s edge, and they’re approaching it in a way that considers the lessons of the I-95 construction and prior, failed attempts to address the problem. Instead of putting up a wall or using chunks of concrete to hold the soil in place, the county is attempting to restore the marsh grasses that grow here naturally. Their roots will help hold the soil in place.
“We hope for it to replicate nature,” said Shannon Marino with Zulu Marine, which builds what are known as living shorelines. “When our solutions are done, you should look at it and not really recognize it as a repair or a bulkhead or a solution. It should just look like nature.”
It’s an increasingly popular way to address coastal erosion in the face of rising seas. Georgia is home to more than a third of the connected marsh habitat along the coast of the Southeastern U.S. — hundreds of thousands of acres. It serves as a critical buffer against storms, and it’s broadly protected under state law. But as sea levels rise due to climate change, protecting the existing marsh plants is only one step.
With the sea level on Georgia’s coast projected to rise one to two meters in the next 75 years, the marshes will need to move inland too. They’re well equipped to do that, according to University of North Carolina wetland scientist Lori Sutter.
“Because of the magic of salt marshes,” she said, “they’re able to persist in this environment where they’re flooded twice a day, every day.”
But that magic of salt marshes only works if they have somewhere to go. Once a migrating marsh encounters a paved road or a building, they hit a dead end. There’s nowhere for new grasses to take root, which means the rising tide can sweep in unabated, flooding both the marsh and that road or building.
That’s why a new action plan by a coalition of conservation groups, scientists, government agencies, and coastal communities calls for protecting not just the salt marsh itself, but also the adjacent land. The plan has identified more than 56,000 acres of land in Georgia where marshes will likely migrate that are also currently open to development.
“That creates this really vast area that you’re trying to conserve, which can be overwhelming,” said Courtney Reich, the coastal director for Georgia Conservancy. Her group is working with Phil Odom and the other stakeholders in Midway and is spearheading the Georgia work under the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative, a multi-state effort to restore and protect coastal salt marshes.
It’s a roadmap, not a binding policy or seizure of anyone’s land. Instead, the plan’s authors hope it can help landowners and public officials make informed decisions.
“You know, do we want to build up to the edge of the water or do we want to leave room?” Reich said.
Short-term needs often drive land use conversations, she said. This plan aims to get people thinking about the long view.
Salt marshes by their very nature are always moving. Odom, an avid fisher, has watched Georgia’s dynamic coast change in slow motion over the last 75 years: deep salt water moving into areas that once teemed with marsh grass, marshes in new places, the tide creeping ever higher and leaving the ghostly skeletons of salt-choked trees in its wake. But sea level rise driven by climate change is forcing them to move faster — and adding urgency, because if the marshes can’t respond, Georgia’s coast will be left that much more vulnerable.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new plan to preserve Georgia’s marshes: Give them space to migrate on Aug 10, 2026.
