The health of Sussex’s rivers, farmland, and floodplains shapes the life you find in the kelp forests and on the seabed. This is why, at Sussex Bay we’re embracing a source-to-sea mindset – an approach that doesn’t just focus on the shoreline or the ocean but understands that the story of marine recovery begins far inland, in the choices we make about land use, water, soil, and community.

Pressures felt upriver accumulate downstream, eventually hitting our estuaries and marine habitats – where they reduce water quality and disrupt the complex web of marine life that our coast depends on. If we want to see kelp forests recover, fish stocks rebuild, and carbon stored in saltmarsh and mudflats, then we need to go upstream – not just literally, but in our thinking. That’s what source-to-sea recovery means.

Thinking Like Water

What does it mean to “think source to sea”? It’s about recognising that no single intervention or marine protected area, no individual nature reserve can succeed if the whole system is sick.

It’s also about hope. Because once you start looking upstream, you begin to see all the opportunities. You see that every new wetland pond, every restored hedgerow, every act of rewilding in the upper catchment can ripple outward. You start to see a future where Sussex becomes not just a place of environmental concern, but of ecological leadership.

Actions in Sussex are seeing success: mussel beds growing across our seabed, fishers backing restoration efforts, communities getting involved in citizen science. Our Blueprint sets the foundations for building a thriving future for our marine and coastal environments and the communities which rely on them, where many actions of different sizes will be needed.

Source-to-sea isn’t just a technical term. It’s a way of thinking that invites everyone in. Its about experiencing nature as a series of interconnected parts that are able to benefit one another and exploring how we fit into that system. Thinking source-to-sea lets us explore the menagerie of pressures that accumulate across a landscape and understand the impacts they have on land, rivers and into our oceans. When thought of in this way, we start to unpick and plan for recovery as scale, where loads of small actions can add up to major positive benefit.

We must recognise that the health of our marine environment depends on all of us thinking in systems, across boundaries, and beyond silos.

Because the sea doesn’t stop at the shore. And neither should we.

If you want to learn more about Sussex Bay and our Blueprint, check out our webpage: Sussexbay.org.uk

By Dr. Lewis White, Research Lead, Sussex Bay