Shoring up for the future

A look at how some Nova Scotia towns and cities are preparing their waterfronts for what they know is coming.

Artist’s rendering of the new Pictou Market wharf and breakwater, slotted for completion by the end of 2026. Photo courtesy of the Town of Pictou.

Following the devastating impacts of Hurricane Fiona in 2022, the Town of Pictou has become one of Nova Scotia’s first communities to restructure its waterfront.

As warming oceans trigger ever more and larger tropical storms with their increased winds and accompanying storm surge (a rise in sea level that causes tides to spill onto roads and properties), over the last decade the Pictou waterfront has experienced corresponding and consistent flooding in line with those changes, says town engineer Iain MacIsaac.

Fiona, he says, “was the eyeopener for how bad things could be,” with the tide moving 200 metres up from the waterline and dealing significant damage to the curling club. The town’s justice centre and RCMP detachment were narrowly spared.

Three years on, Pictou has just broken ground to raise a 220-metre stretch of its waterfront road by up to two metres using a stone base. For Pictou, the highest sea level projected for 2100 is 1.8 metres.

“If we had a big wave — Fiona’s the worst case — it would hit the four feet of extra height [along the road] and just bounce back to the harbour,” MacIsaac says.

Pictou waterfront. Photo courtesy of the Town of Pictou.

He says the road-raising project, slotted for completion by December 2025, was already on his mind a year prior to Fiona hitting; the town’s Waterfront Master Plan advised waterfront infrastructure improvements mere months before the hurricane hit.

Last year, when Nova Scotia shelved its Coastal Protection Act, MacIsaac turned to provincial flood-mapping data to understand where and by how much the Pictou waterfront needed to change and adapt. A Dartmouth environmental engineering firm helped with surveys and designs.

Since October 2024, a permanent breakwater (an offshore or shore-parallel structure built to protect a harbour, anchorage, or beach from wave action and storm surges) has also been under construction for Pictou Marina to replace a floating version.

The town initially also considered a stone base for the breakwater, but redevelopment of the waterfront over Pictou’s more than 250-year history has created modern-day challenges.

“There are a lot of old buried wharves and old structures that are out where the wharf is,” MacIsaac says, and “essentially 18 metres of structural garbage.” Rock placed today could sink within four years, he says, so the town is driving steel and timber into the seabed to hold the breakwater on “confident material.”

“With the work that we’re doing, I know if we had Fiona again, we wouldn’t have the damages that we got [in 2022],” MacIsaac says.

However, he says it will fall on emergency planning to flood-proof buildings, which could require a three-metre raising of waterfront properties.

After the waterfront road is raised this fall, the Market Wharf breakwater and Marine Construction project — which also includes a lifting of the wharf to keep the wharf and breakwater level/accessible — is slotted for completion by the end of 2026.

Halifax boardwalk rendering. Photo courtesy of Build NS.

Other waterfront jurisdictions in Nova Scotia have followed suit post-Fiona, including the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), which has done extensive flood mapping while also conducting a wave run-up study that identifies where shorelines are vulnerable to wave-induced flooding.

To protect Shore Road in Eastern Passage from storm damage, HRM is installing a cobble beach and submerged rock breakwater along the shoreline that will reduce wave impact and erosion.

As HRM updates its Regional Plan, there’s also a proposal to increase the setback required for coastal developments from 20 to 30 horizontal metres away from watercourses (any channel through which water flows including rivers, streams, drains or culverts).*  As for Halifax’s waterfront, Build Nova Scotia says they “assess assets and properties for climate risk on a project-by-project basis” as they “refresh and add new infrastructure.” That assessment has resulted in raised wharves and wharf extensions by approximately one metre, in anticipation of future boardwalk raisings. 

The Armour Group’s Queen’s Marque development, which figures prominently on the Halifax waterfront, looked to the kind of changes cities like New York and Boston were making to handle rising sea levels and incorporated ideas like dowelling boards along the boardwalk to concrete and placing generators on the roof and the electrical above ground to protect from the unpredictability of weather events. They also created a “submarine room’ that could be sealed off in the case of flooding as a result of storm surge.

CLIMAtlantic, a network that provides data and information to support adaptation to climate change in Atlantic Canada, has a slightly different take on what should be prioritized. Its executive director, Sabine Dietz, says managed retreat — relocating people, buildings, and infrastructure away from hazard-exposed areas, rather than reinforcing existing shorelines — is key.

Dietz argues that raising and fortifying existing infrastructure, and using rocks to protect shorelines, doesn’t completely solve the risk posed by storm surge. Although she agrees that hardening city and town shore areas is still a useful tool, she adds that cities like Halifax must also consider worst-case climate scenarios, which means planning to relocate infrastructure such as hospitals, seniors homes, and lower-income neighbourhoods.

She encourages communities, homeowners, and people considering buying property to consult provincial flood mapping, looking as far as 2100 to understand how coastal storm and flood risk will unfold and can be addressed on a rolling basis.

Resources available to community members and property owners include CLIMAtlantic’s Coastal Adaptation Toolkit, which helps simulate land-use planning and interventions to mitigate seaside flooding and erosion. When relocating buildings and infrastructure farther inland isn’t possible, Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change agrees that where appropriate and realistic, living shorelines and other nature-based solutions should be applied rather than trying to barricade out storms and rising seas with walls and rocks.

In the town of Lunenburg, a UNESCO World Heritage site, new CAO Paul Nopper has his sights set on replacing the Tannery Road culvert to reduce flood risk between New Town and Old Town Lunenburg. During high tide in Lunenburg Harbour, particularly during storms, stormwater outflow from the culvert gets restricted, needing work to allow it to gradually release water.

Lunenburg waterfront area. Photo courtesy of Tourism NS.

Lunenburg’s municipal district projects local sea levels could rise an additional 1.57 metres by 2100. Also, by then, and according to the town’s municipal planning strategy, “current modeling suggests that sea levels in Lunenburg could be 0.83 metres higher than they are now,” adding “when combined with storm surge, these rising water levels present a very real risk to coastal development.”

“We’re starting to see, like everyone else, that because of climate change we have stronger storms and climate issues,” Nopper says. “It’s time to get ahead of the curve.”

As a result, Lunenburg has stepped up to become one of several coastal Nova Scotian municipalities opting into the Clean Foundation — a program delivery non-profit taking on climate change challenges — Community Climate Capacity program this year, which, at no expense, allocates specialists to assist in local adaptation planning.

By working with the program to balance locals’ interests while protecting the town’s assets, Nopper sees the program’s potential as “a great way to start to build a climate lens for the community.”

*As of publication, the province is actively working to block this part of the regional plan, prioritizing housing over environmental and climate change-related development concerns.

Climate Stories Atlantic is an initiative of Climate Focus, a non-profit organization dedicated to covering stories about community-driven climate solutions.

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