Bass River is almost halfway between Truro and Parrsboro, just off the Trunk 2 Highway. on the banks of Nova Scotia’s Cobequid Bay.

Once known for shipbuilding, furniture manufacturing, timber exports, silica mining, and fishing, Bass River boasted a bank and a hotel in the early 20th century. The Dominion Chair Company had 40 to 70 workers in the village at any given time from when it opened in the late 19th century until it closed in 1989 after its sixth fire.

Wendy Cox is a board member at the Bass River heritage museum and runs the Dominion Chair General Store out of the company’s former headquarters. Her family summered at their cottage in Bass River before moving there from Truro, N.S., in 1980. The community has struggled since the loss of the chair factory but business gets a big bump during cottage season. “The population pretty much doubles on our shore,” she says.

Ralph Wardrope bought his property in Bass River from his father in 1997, who purchased it in 1976. Since then, the tides have carried away huge chunks of sandy bank at the edge of his land.

“It’s a further walk out to the water at low tide,” Wardrope says. “There’s a hell of a lot of land lost up and down the coast.”

Wardrope’s cottage sits on a tenth of a hectare with about 30 metres of steep bank on the south side that drops six metres down to the beach.

“I’m going to say we lost close to 120, maybe 130 feet (36 to 40 metres) from when dad first purchased the cottage,” Wardrope says. “I’m paying property tax for land that’s at the bottom of the Cobequid Bay.”

I grew up with the Wardropes, fishing at the cottage with Ralph’s son, Tim. I remember the year they lost the road.

“One November, the whole thing went,” Wardrope says. “I think we lost about 30 feet (10 metres) of bank that year.”

Cox has installed breakwaters, but nothing stops the tide. “We’ve lost three roads in 30 years,” she says.

Between 1984 and 2015, the Earth lost almost 28,000 square kilometres of land to erosion according to the “Global long-term observations of coastal erosion and accretion” study from a research centre that advises the European Union. That’s almost twice as much land as it added through accretion, the process that feeds beaches and carries sediment to marshlands. The study’s authors concluded human activity and construction are the main causes of land loss.

Tim Webster is a lead research scientist in applied geomatics at Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) in Middleton. “Very typical in Nova Scotia as well as the rest of the Maritimes, those rates turn out to be … 30 centimetres a year on average,” he says.

Erosion is episodic so the average can be deceiving.

“One big storm and all of the sudden maybe you’ve eroded a couple of metres,” Webster says.

Wardrope says he’s got about six metres before the Cobequid Bay reaches his septic tank. “I’m not sure what I’ll do after that,” he says.

It’s hard to know where shoreline erosion ends and flooding begins in the overlapping classification of climate disasters, but with 13,000 kilometres of coast, Nova Scotia could be ground zero. The Bay of Fundy, which feeds the Chignecto Bay and boasts the highest tides in the world, is a big variable.

To understand erosion rates and develop a predictive model, Webster and his team use aerial photography and LIDAR (a remote-sensing method using lasers) to calculate the volume of lost material.

When post-tropical storm Fiona hit Atlantic Canada in September 2022, Webster says the water temperature off Nova Scotia was still 20C. Warming oceans drive hurricanes and sustain their strength in northern latitudes. “That, by far, was the highest storm surge we’ve ever recorded,” he adds.

Four people died in the region from the effects of Fiona, the most expensive extreme weather event in the history of Atlantic Canada, with an estimated cost of $660 million in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

P.E.I. lost at least 60 roads and bridges, and six schools were damaged during Fiona, says a report from the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The storm “resulted in erosion of mainland and barrier sandy beach systems including about 40 km of shoreline managed by Prince Edward Island National Park,” says a study that included researchers from the Maritimes and around the world.

The Northumberland Strait is the body of water that separates Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by as little as 13 kilometres at its narrowest.

Professor Danika van Proosdij, the director of the TransCoastal Adaptations Centre, says the Northumberland coast is one of the most vulnerable in the region. “We’ve got high rates of erosion occurring in areas that are basically exposed to large swells and waves of the Atlantic Ocean,” she says.

The Confederation Bridge that connects P.E.I. to New Brunswick is north of Bass River, on the other side of the Chignecto Isthmus, the 24-kilometre wide land bridge connecting Nova Scotia to New Brunswick. Close to $100 million in trade crosses it daily, according to Nova Scotian government figures — $35 billion a year.

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia reached an agreement with the federal government to split the cost to protect the Chignecto Isthmus with infrastructure upgrades in March after a long debate over who would pay for a proposed project with an estimated budget of $650 million.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it was “remarkable” the federal government had not assumed full financial responsibility for the isthmus in a 2024 statement and unsuccessfully challenged the decision in court.

In other parts of the province, the Houston government made coastal protection the responsibility of municipalities and private landowners by scrapping the Coastal Protection Act (CPA) in February 2024, even though it passed with all-party support in 2019.

The province released the Future of Nova Scotia’s Coastline plan in place of the CPA. The plan gives responsibility for coastal management to a minority of private landowners, says Nicolas Winkler, coastal adaptation coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. “Any other jurisdiction in the world that is looking at coastal management, they are taking a comprehensive approach to their coastlines,” he says.

A 2009 report says 86 per cent of Nova Scotia’s coast is privately owned, which is why Winkler says it doesn’t make ecological or financial sense to divide coastal management among owners and municipalities with different capacities. He says provincial legislation would act like a building code for the coast to protect the landscape, developers, and ecosystems.

Private landowners often build seawalls or dump boulders to harden the shore, a practice Winkler says is destructive to coastal environments. A 2024 study showed 33 per cent of the world’s sandy coastline is hardened, “losing the natural adaptability to accommodate future sea level rise, and is therefore more prone to experience beach loss as the shoreline retreats.”

All that remains of the boulders the Wardropes have dropped over the bank since the 1990s are piles of stone and concrete slabs strewn across the beach at low tide. “We used to have wonderful sandy beaches,” says Cox. “Now we have boulders.”

Nature-based solutions like the living shoreline in Mahone Bay, N.S., are gaining popularity with the Insurance Bureau of Canada and engineering associations but more rigid elements, such as rock sills and hybrid solutions, may be necessary in “higher wave-energy settings,” Van Proosdij says. “Where we have the really tall cliffs and high rates of erosion, a lot of energy, it’s going to be very challenging for a straight nature-based solution to work.”

In the 1970s, climate disasters accounted for US$183.9 billion in global losses, says a report by ArcGIS, a digital tool that uses annotated maps to explain complex issues. From 2010 to 2019, that increased by more than 800 per cent to US$1.5 trillion. Losses from storms and floods were the fastest growing categories.

After watching the coast for 62 years, Wardrope says it might be time for a change. “Might look great, might have beautiful views, might sell for millions of bucks. But it’s stupid because, you know, through the years, this land is going to be gone.”

Carve out: Bay of Fundy
Every year, more than 300,000 tourists visit Fundy National Park in southern New Brunswick to see the impact of the world’s highest tides.

The waters range 16 metres between high and low tide in some places, as more than 640 billion tonnes of water moves through the bay, more than 16 times the volume of all the rivers on earth combined, force-feeding rivers and tributaries.

The full power of the funnelling effect is on display where the Cobequid Bay flows into the Shubenacadie River in Maitland, N.S. The incoming tidal force on the Shubenacadie is so great it generates a tidal bore, a wall of water that charges upriver ahead of the incoming tide.

I worked as a rafting guide on the Shubie River in the early 2000s. During the slow, lazy trip upriver at low tide, there is evidence of erosion carved into the limestone cliffs and steep mud banks, but it’s hard to believe the placid waters created such spectacular geography until the tide turns.

The river jumps between six and 10 metres in two hours with every incoming tide, tearing up trees, reshaping the landscape and offering one hell of a ride to tourists craving a tidal adventure. The collapsing chunks of bank giving way under the incoming tide make erosion visible in real-time.

This is the process Wardrope describes outside his cottage: Slow, steady, and unnoticeable until it all collapses like a Jenga tower in a winter storm.

Deflecting the problem
Shoreline hardening, AKA “grey infrastructure” or “armouring,” is part of highway, railway, building, and shoreline developments that defend against erosion, said a 2024 study in the Nature Communications journal measuring the effect of hardening on the world’s beaches. Grey infrastructure includes seawalls built from stone and concrete to protect private land.

The Ecology Action Centre’s Nicolas Winkler says sea walls deflect wave energy to neighbouring properties, which encourages neighbours to harden their shoreline, creating a domino effect. Even with the province’s push for nature-based solutions, using trees, plants, and other natural features to protect properties from erosion, rising sea levels, and flooding, regulations still make it easier for property owners to harden their shores.

Wardrope’s family started dumping combinations of boulders and concrete blocks over the bank in the early 1990s. The waves eroded straight through. All that remains of the wall and the road today are squat piles of boulders and concrete slabs on the beach, 20 metres offshore at low tide.

Living Shoreline
The Living Shoreline in Mahone Bay, N.S., uses natural materials to reduce shoreline erosion. It includes three components.

• Rock sill: hard infrastructure runs along the shore to provide stability.
• Tidal wetland: shallow slope comprised of plants that survive flooding, reduce wave energy and stabilize the sandy base.
• Vegetated bank: graded area planted with native shrubs that protect the bank.