Loving our coastlines

Dr Sandy Britain. Picture by Paul Rickard

Dr Sandy Britain was born in the United Kingdom and went on to follow his many interests such as rockclimbing, surfing, how brains function, e-learning and human impact on the environment.

He was born in Fareham, a small town not far from Portsmouth in Hampshire on the South Coast of England, but never felt settled there. He yearned for adventure. He went on a school rock-climbing trip to Snowdonia, North Wales and never looked back.

“I became a dedicated climber and fell in love with Wales.”

As soon as he was able to leave school, he got a job as a climbing instructor in Llanberis in Snowdonia.

“My mother's family name is Evans which is Welsh in origin and maybe that is partly what drew me back.”

Llanberis is a unique place for climbers and mountaineers which attracts top climbers from all over the world, many of whom he was lucky enough to climb with and call friends.

The mid-1980s, when he first moved, was an incredibly exciting time and he rapidly embraced the world of alpine climbing.

“In 1987 with my friend, the South African climber, Andy de Klerk, I climbed the North Face of the Eiger which was an experience that left an indelible mark on me as a 19-year-old.

“The following year I was invited to join a British expedition to attempt a first ascent on a big wall in the Karakorum called Biblimotin.

“We didn't succeed on the route due to incessant bad weather, but I spent a good deal of time being battered in storms suspended on the wall in a portaledge, so it was quite an exciting, if slightly odd way, to spend a summer holiday,” he said.

That same year he applied to go to university in Bangor, a few miles from where he lived in Llanberis, to study sports science and psychology.

While doing his first degree, he became fascinated by issues in how the brain controls movement and how movement disorders such as Parkinson's Disease reveal information about how all movements are controlled by the brain.

“At the same time, I was introduced to a way of modelling aspects of brain function using a form of AI model called neural networks.

“My PhD, which was also at Bangor University, involved using neural networks to investigate movement control problems in Parkinson's Disease.

“The details are a bit technical to get into here (and I probably can't remember many of them now), but it was so much fun and a great privilege to be funded to explore wherever my research led me for four years.”

After finishing his PhD, he needed a job. There was a research group at the university building educational software for e-learning over the internet — which was still in its infancy in 1997 as far as public use went.

“The novel idea within the group I worked with was to revolutionise the way education is delivered, to allow students to access their learning anywhere, anytime using the World Wide Web.

“It sounds so obvious and quite trivial now 20 years later but it really was a new idea at the time.”

He was taken on as a software developer originally but rapidly got interested in the potential education and social ramifications of the internet.

“Of course, now e-learning or online learning has suddenly become part and parcel of everyday life for many families with school-age children in the lockdown.

“It's definitely an easier proposition now that the world isn't on dial-up like it was when I started working in this field. We constantly had to creatively design our technology solutions for the tiny bandwidth that was available then. Video technologies like Skype or Zoom were impossible back then.”

One problem with being a rock-climber living in Wales is the weather.

“It is absolutely dreadful for at least half the year and when rain soaks the crags, you need something to do.

“So a bunch of us climbers thought it was a good idea to start surfing as something to do in winter when the wind was howling onshore and it was too cold and wet to climb — we didn't realise the waves are much better when the wind is offshore. I think we only discovered that by complete accident, arriving at the beach one day when it was coincidentally offshore.”

Climbers are by nature quite obsessive people, he said.

“So it was no surprise that when introduced to possibly the most addictive and frustrating sport that exists, several of us became absolutely hooked.”

Luckily his wife, Frances Watling, who he met when they were both students at university in Bangor, is a keen climber and also became one of the obsessive surfers.

“So at some point, together with our son Jack (who was nine at the time) we decided to go on an extended surfing trip to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.”

While in New Zealand near the end of the trip, they decided to come to Gisborne as they had heard there were some good waves there.

“We ended up staying with family friends Sam and Vicky Mottart, at their invitation, and had the best time and waves of the entire trip. It was April, with offshore breezes all day, and we couldn't believe how stunning the beaches and whole region were.

“We hadn't really thought about staying, but sort of found we couldn't bring ourselves to leave . . . that was in 2003.”

After sorting out things in Wales on their return and selling their house, they moved back here in 2004 and have been living a stone's throw from their wonderful and enduring friends, the Mottarts, ever since.

Frances and Sandy raised their son Jack in Gisborne. He attended Wainui Primary School, Ilminster Intermediate and Campion College and then went to London to study history at university. He then did a PhD and worked as an investigative journalist for Reuters, the Guardian and others, and is now a research fellow at RUSI (Royal United Services Institute).

“It was a fabulous place for Jack to grow up.”

Sandy's journey with Sustainable Coastlines started when he met one of the founders, Sam Judd, on a surf trip in the Galapagos Islands in 2007. This was before Sustainable Coastlines existed.

Sam was appalled at the rubbish being drawn onto and dumped all around the coastline of the World Heritage area by the Humboldt current.

“There was tonnes of the stuff.”

He and his mate hired a fishing boat and between the two of them cleared as much rubbish as they could to highlight the issue of plastic waste in oceans, which, at the time, had not really caught people's attention.

“I was hugely impressed with the vision, drive and foresight of these two guys. They kept in touch and when Sam invited me to come and film a massive clean-up they had planned in the Ha'apai Islands in Tonga from the air using his paramotor a couple of years later, I jumped at the chance.

“That trip was an incredible experience. We became firm friends and shortly afterwards Sustainable Coastlines was founded as a charity. That was over ten years ago.

“Sam and Camden Howitt, the co-founder of Sustainable Coastlines, came to see me and asked if I would be interested in a role leading a three-year project funded by the Ministry for Environment with education, community science and technology workstreams. Again, I jumped at the chance.”

That was the litter intelligence project which is about to enter its third year.

“Thanks to the dedication and hard work of everyone involved, we have made huge progress. They now have a fully operational community-led environmental monitoring programme surveying spots all around the New Zealand coastlines for marine litter and entering the data into the database on litterintelligence.org.

“We are working closely with other groups such as NIWA (in the freshwater litter monitoring space) and Stormwater 360 on Littatrap monitoring to integrate their data with the coastline data.

“We have trialled our education programme aimed at environmental-behaviour change in a number of schools and are ready to take it nationwide in the coming year.

“In a separate project, Microsoft have funded us to build AI image recognition functionality into the technology to improve the litter-auditing process and reliability.

“This is such an important issue to be working on. It is very exciting to be involved in this work at this time, when it has reached a level of public awareness and is an issue that many people care passionately about and are willing to get behind.

“It helps to show that when we work together, we can tackle big problems that seem utterly intractable.

“This is an invaluable lesson for us all to learn, as we will continue to have to tackle more of these sorts of problems in the coming years.

“Specifically with this project, I am fortunate that I have been able to bring all my various experiences and work background — which honestly have more often been a product of whatever sparks my interest when the opportunity has arisen, rather than any kind of planned drive towards some predetermined singular goal — into play and put them to good use.

“It is very satisfying. Also I get to work with a whole variety of smart, highly-motivated and diverse people, both with our staff and partners at Sustainable Coastlines and also in the communities that we work with.

“I firmly believe that through litter intelligence, we can enable the community of citizen scientists and educators, using the tools we have developed, to grow throughout New Zealand, to expand to other countries and communities in the Pacific region, and beyond. That way we collectively have a chance of making real change to the litter problem.

“The litter intelligence is only one of the workstreams that Sustainable Coastlines is involved in. The charity is very active in freshwater quality and tree-planting work too. My hope is that Sustainable Coastlines will be able to continue to use our combined skills and influence to add value and keep making a difference for at least another ten years to come.”