The planting in an EcoShield absorbs the pressure wave from a bomb blast, so less of it reaches the people on the other side.
An EcoShield is a bank of dense planting with an engineered structure inside it. Each one is designed for the site it stands on. It looks like landscape because it is landscape.
How can planting reduce a blast?
The wave passes into dense living material, and the material takes up its energy. What comes out the other side is a weaker wave.
That absorption is the whole of the effect. Less force reaches the people standing in harm’s way.
It is engineered to dissipate a blast in several ways, including biomass loading, impedance mismatch and materials failure.
Biomass loading is the mass of the living material itself taking up the force of the wave. Impedance mismatch happens when the wave crosses between materials of very different density. It scatters and weakens as it goes. Materials failure is foliage breaking under load, which accounts for part of the energy absorbed.
None of this is our idea alone. Peer-reviewed research has already looked at how dense planting can reduce a blast. It includes work in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning and related studies of trees as protective barriers. What is ours is four years of experimental validation at Cranfield University. That work turned the idea into something a site can be designed around.
Why can a solid wall make things worse?
A wall reflects. The wave arrives, meets a surface that will not move, and a large part of the energy comes back off it. Close to the wall the pressure a person experiences can be higher than it would have been in open ground.
Protective engineers know this trade well. It is why hard barriers are placed and specified with such care. It is also why, where people stand close to the boundary, a measure that takes energy in cannot be swapped for one that sends it back.
What is an EcoShield made of?
A dense run of planting with an engineered structure inside it. We recommend a shortlist of planting to suit the site, its climate and the upkeep it can sustain, and you choose from it. The structure is what makes it a protective measure, with a stated performance envelope.
We design it, specify it and assure it. Our partners carry out the planting, installation and maintenance to that specification. What stands on the site is what was designed, and it stays that way.
Is an EcoShield a vehicle barrier?
No. An EcoShield is designed for a bomb carried in by a person, in a public space. Vehicle mitigation is a different problem with its own established answers. Many of the sites we talk to already have it.
It is also not decorative planting with a security story attached. The engineering inside it and the assurance behind it are the whole of the product.
Does an EcoShield enclose a site?
No. It is not a fence, and it is not there to stop anyone getting anywhere. It stands where the pressure would travel, so that less of it reaches the people on the other side.
That is why an EcoShield has gaps in it. People walk through and carry on down the street, and the street works the way it did before.
How much does an EcoShield cost?
Every EcoShield is priced for its site.
The cost depends on four things: the threat it is designed against, the length and shape of the EcoShield, the planting the site can sustain, and the ground it stands on.
There are three parts to the cost: a design fee, planting and installation by our partners, and maintenance and assurance for the life of the EcoShield.
You will have an indicative range for your site by the end of the first call. A full proposal follows a site assessment.
The methodHow an EcoShield is designed
Step 1Understand the threat and the site
We start with what could realistically happen here. That means the kind of device, how it would arrive, and where people would be standing when it went off. We look at that alongside the security the site already has: its bollards, its hardened structures and its procedures on the day. An EcoShield is one part of that plan.
Together, those tell us where an EcoShield is needed and what it has to stand up to.
Step 2Agree what it has to do
Before anything is designed, we agree with you what the EcoShield needs to do. Part of that is protection: how much of the pressure from a blast it has to absorb before that pressure reaches people. The rest is practical. It has to fit how the site runs from day to day, and it has to be affordable to look after for years.
Those practical points shape the design as much as the threat does. Settling them at the start means what gets built is something the site can live with, not just something that works on paper.
Step 3Design it, build it right, keep it right
We then design the EcoShield for that site: its length and shape, the planting, the structure inside it, and the protection it is designed to give.
We set out exactly what is to be built and check that it was built that way. We also say how to keep it in the condition the design assumed. Planting only protects people if it stays as it was designed.
Talk it through against a real site
Thirty minutes. What you are protecting, what the site allows, who signs it off, and whether anything is forcing a decision.