Increasing Land-Sea Synergies and Coastal-Rural Collaboration for a Healthy Ocean: The COASTAL Project

Abstract

Coastal and sea regions not only concentrate populations and intensive economic activity but also environmental stresses and higher levels of pollution. On the other hand, rural hinterlands face depopulation and often economic recession while still environmentally impacting coastal regions. Land-based activities (agriculture, forestry, industries and urbanization) are directly and indirectly impacting land, coastal and sea ecosystems (soil and river pollutions, marine water eutrophication, etc.), and the coastal regions are the downstream recipient of these land use negative practice externalities. The EU H2020 COASTAL project, presented in this chapter (This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement N° 773,782.), adopts an innovative source-to-sea approach where at river basin scale, sea, coastal and rural regions are seen as a whole and single ecosystem. The project seeks to improve land-sea synergies in strategic business and policy decision making, and collaborations between coastal and rural stakeholders in order to (1) create connections between land ecosystems and coastal ecosystems, for sustainable use and management of theses ecosystems as well as reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300) (focusing on SDG 6, 13, 14, 15); (2) support sustainable growth in rural, coastal and marine sectors by fostering cross-sectoral collaborations; and (3) develop links between EU WFD, MFD and CAP by developing policy alternatives for coastal-rural areas. The COASTAL project adopts a strong iterative participatory multi-actor, bottom-up approach based on collaboration between rural, coastal and sea stakeholders via Multi-Actor Labs (MALs) centred around six selected coastal regions (in Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Greece, Spain and France) with both common and unique opportunities and challenges. The methodology and tools used combine local and scientific knowledge to explore and analyse social, environmental and economic land-sea interactions in a collaborative System Dynamics framework to identify problems and develop practical and robust business road maps and strategic policy guidelines to improve land-sea synergies and coastal-rural collaborations.