A Systems Approach for Sustainable Development in Coastal Zones

Coastal zone developmentThis Special Feature of Ecology and Society brings together important outcomes of the EU-funded project: Science-Policy Integration for Coastal System Assessment, SPICOSA.The title of the project revealed its innovative nature from the start.The premise was to bind scientific information to policy decisions and to consider the coastal zone as an integrated ecological-social-economic system.As a result, the SPICOSA project was very broad, ambitious, and required multidisciplinary teams of researchers to work together: natural scientists such as oceanographers and ecologists, social scientists, economists, and modelers.In itself, this was a tour de force.In addition, the project required a participatory role from stakeholders or actors, e.g., institutions, NGOs, economic sectors, etc., as well as from coastal managers and decision makers.SPICOSA is relevant to several facets of environmental policy such as the Water Framework Directive, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the Habitat Directive, and NATURA2000, as well as the ICZM-Integrated Coastal Zone Management recommendation.The primary objective of the project was to develop a practical application of the Systems Approach Framework (SAF), which represents an important step forward to enable the appropriate implementation of these policies.The SAF was applied at 18 study sites, representing a wide variety of European coastal systems, including transitional waters such as lagoons, deltas, and estuaries, along the coasts of the European regional seas, from the shores of the Black Sea to the fjords of Norway.The SAF addresses the general problem of assessing complex systems for conversion to sustainable development and thereby makes a valuable contribution to sustainability science.This contribution is not just at an academic level, because it has been demonstrated to be fully operational for European coastal systems, despite the wide range of governance that these systems encompass.Although the SPICOSA sites are European, the widespread applicability of the SAF makes it relevant at the global scale.As such, SPICOSA was recognized by Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone as one of the truly integrative projects joining social and ecological aspects of coastal systems and with the SAF representing a major advance in the use of the system approach in coastal zones.

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