Integrated coastal zone management

Contrasting climate change and extreme weather events is one of the greatest challenges of our time, particularly for coastal areas. According to Eurostat 2019 data, half of the European population lives within a 50-kilometer radius of the coast, while in Italy coastal municipalities, that is, those that have at least one section of their border washed by the sea, are only 8.1 percent even though they occupy 14 percent of the total national territory on which 28.4 percent of the national population lives (ISTAT).

The summary data on the occupation of littoral areas returns a picture of how intense the anthropogenic pressure exerted on coastal areas is. At sea, the situation is not very dissimilar; maritime traffic, professional fishing, tourism and natural heritage conservation can conflict with each other at very different spatial and temporal scales, generating negative environmental externalities.

The challenge of Integrated Coastal Zone Management is to make different economies, sectors, social needs, policies and systems talk to each other, trying to coordinate the development process more efficiently and effectively. The European Union through its programmatic and implementation tools is giving the scientific community a great opportunity to enhance its knowledge, often very sectoral, in a broader framework that we could call “science to policy” elements such as ecosystem resilience along with the enhancement of coastal identity profiles should come together through a synthesis process to propose a new model of resource use.

The talk aims to provide a contribution to the lively interdisciplinary debate around the issues of integrated coastal zone management also through the citation of activities carried out at different scales of application.

05.11.2020 - Online