Research project COASTAL | Collaborative land-sea integration platform

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.