COASTAL: Collaborative Land-Sea Integration Platform
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme COASTAL is a research and innovation project, a unique multi-actor collaboration of coastal and rural business entrepreneurs, administrations, stakeholders, and natural and social science experts to formulate and evaluate business solutions and policy recommendations aimed at improving the coastal-rural synergy to foster rural and coastal development while preserving the environment.
The overarching objective of COASTAL is to improve the rural-coastal synergies in strategic business and policy decision making and collaboration between coastal and rural actors. 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.
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.
The COASTAL project:
- contributes to integrated coastal-rural planning and coastal-rural synergy in the case study regions and the wider EU territory
- develops a durable, online platform for knowledge exchange about coastal-rural synergy with concrete examples and tools for supporting land-sea collaboration
Grant agreement ID: 773782
Duration: Start date 1 May 2018 – End date 30 October 2022
Budget: Overall € 4 999 943,75
28 partners
Coordinated By Vlaamse Instelling Voor Technologisch Onderzoek N.V., Belgium
Partnership: International Center for Research on The Environment and the Economy (ICRE8) – GREECE
Principal Investigator is Prof. Koundouri. Members of the team are: Dr. Ebun Akinsete, Eleftherios Levantis, Alice Guittard.