Stockholm university

Research project Collaborative land-sea integration platform (COASTAL)

COASTAL is a unique collaboration between 29 partners from 8 EU Member States, representing entrepreneurs, administrations and scientific experts in coastal and rural enterprises who engage actors and stakeholders at all levels by combining local knowledge and scientific expertise in a co-creation process.

By combining local knowledge and scientific expertise in a co-creation process the COASTAL project engages actors and stakeholders at all levels to improve coastal-rural interdependence and collaboration by identifying problems and setting up evidence-based business roadmaps and policy solutions, focusing on economic growth, marine spatial planning, and environmental protection, including inland water quality. COASTAL contributes to integrated coastal-rural planning and coastal-rural synergy in six case study regions and the wider EU territory, and develops a durable, online platform for knowledge exchange about coastal-rural interactions with concrete examples and tools for supporting land-sea collaboration and sustainable development.

South-West Messinia, Greece
South-West Messinia, Greece

Project description

COASTAL is a multi-actor collaboration of coastal and rural sectors to formulate and evaluate business and policy solutions, aimed at improving coastal-rural synergy for sustainable regional development and environmental protection. This is achieved by developing, demonstrating and applying a generic toolset and performance indicators by combining a multi-actor approach with system dynamics modelling. This allows us to understand the interactions with market, demographic, environmental and climate forecasts, and quantify the positive and negative externalities. The project is organized around seven interacting work packages (WPs), each of which oversees and/or is responsible for various parts of the work during the four-year project period. These WPs are followed in six complementary European Multi-Actor Labs (MALs), exchanging their tools and expertise, building new knowledge in relation to their own specific challenges, and contributing to the COASTAL Knowledge Exchange Platform for dissemination to relevant stakeholders.

The multi-actor approach applied for analysing the social-environmental and economic land-sea interactions will highlight potential cross-sectoral interactions and innovation that could emerge from greater cooperation between sea-based and land-based businesses or organisations while also considering the short-, mid- and long-term impacts of decision making and feedback mechanisms on coastal and rural development.

THE PROCESS

  1. Local actors and experts participate in collaborative exercises to analyse problems, the underlying causes, propose and discuss solutions, and validate and interpret the impacts of simulated business and policy decisions.
  2. Qualitative and quantitative techniques are combined in this co-creation process supported by graphical tools to gain in-depth understanding of the systemic transitions underlying the land-sea interactions.
  3. These systemic transitions are synthesized and analysed with system dynamic models to produce multiple transition scenarios for key business and policy indicators.
  4. From these, practical business roadmaps and policy solutions are derived, which are easily updated in the models used to support the analyses.

In this project, Stockholm University (SU) leads the work on the Swedish Norrström/Baltic Sea coastal case study and co-leads the work on the Greek South-West Messinia coastal case study, as SU also operates the Navarino Environmental Observatory (NEO) with focus on the climate and environment of the Mediterranean region.

 

Project members

Project managers

Jean-Luc de Kok

Dr

Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Belgium

Bastiaan Notebaert

Dr

Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Belgium

Members

Georgia Destouni

Professor i hydrologi

Department of Physical Geography
Gia Destouni

Zahra Kalantari

Forskare

Department of Physical Geography
Zahra Kalantari

Publications

More about this project

Partners