Rethinking Coastal Landscapes with Climate-Resilient Interventions: Systemic Land-to-Sea Solutions

Climate change poses a challenge to coastal landscapes, negatively impacting biodiversity. The EU-funded COAST-SCAPES project will rethink the connections between land, coast, and sea systems to enhance resilience and biodiversity. Specifically, it will develop systemic resilience solutions for coastal areas, utilising indicators, early warning systems, business models, and knowledge-driven strategies to mitigate climate risks and improve land-sea interactions. To promote nature-based solutions (NbS), adaptable to various coastal types and governance frameworks, the project focuses on resilience through adaptation. Supported by transformative governance and cross-sector collaboration, the project empowers regions and communities with advanced tools and financial models. It seeks to enhance climate resilience while protecting biodiversity and addressing existing infrastructure challenges.

COAST-SCAPES is a 4-year project where 27 partner organisations from 16 countries will work together to develop nature-based solutions (NbS) to increase the resilience of coastal communities to the impact of climate change. The coastal communities vary in geography, climate, economies, cultures and governance systems. The solutions will be structured as step-by-step plans that help each region adapt to climate change and become more resilient over time.

The project focuses on a set of core, networking, and transfer pilot regions and communities (including the Firth of Lorn near SAMS). These areas have natural and human assets that are sensitive to climate change, are strongly influenced by interactions between land, coast and sea, and can act as at-scale demonstrators for resilience plans that can be replicated and exported elsewhere. Collaboration across key stakeholders (for example government agencies, science, policy, industry, and local communities) in the pilot areas will inform and be informed by financial and ecological models. Integrating stakeholder collaboration with state-of-the art data and modelling tools will underpin the development of local-scale governance mechanisms targeted to support the resilience of local communities and biodiversity to the impacts of climate change. The solutions modelled within the core pilots will be tested across networking and transfer pilot areas, to support well-developed implementation plans.

European Union Horizon Europe