‘We stopped fighting nature and adapted to erosion’

As the recent extreme weather brings the impact of climate change to the fore, a Suffolk farming family who has lost acres of land to the sea explains how they shifted their business to adapt.

Since the 1920s, coastal erosion has reclaimed more than two-thirds of the estate and five homes in the family of Anne Jones.

The government says in many places, sea level rise caused by climate change is likely to increase erosion over time, external.

But rather than abandoning the serene coastline or trying to fight an unwinnable battle with the sea – and the law – the family has chosen a different path.

“It’s a stunning place, it’s beautiful,” says Jones, standing on a remote spot at Easton Bavents, near Southwold.

Once a thriving village and England’s most easterly point, its church disappeared into the sea in the 17th Century and much of the land surrounding it has been eroded.

Jones has spent her life watching the sea reshape her family’s land.

A hundred years ago, her great-grandfather Herbert Boggis used his life savings to buy the 400-acre estate. Since then, the tide has swallowed up two-thirds of it.

She speaks to BBC Suffolk in what was the back garden of a pink house. It ceased to exist in 2020. It was among a row of properties the Jones family had knocked down over the years, before they fell from the cliff and into the sea.

“It’s very tough, for the people who live there and tough for us as owners to have to take them down and just accept that nature take its course and we have to adapt with it,” she says.

“But we’ve recently decided to stop fighting nature and work with it.

“We need to adapt to climate change because we can’t change it, we have to do something positive while the land is still here so people can enjoy it.”