Table of Contents

1. EDITORIAL
by Tom Hopkins, SPICOSA Scientific Coordinator

SPICOSA is about making better use of science and technology for the benefit of society. A controversial topic. From my casual discussions, this topic brings up conflicting impressions. The public has a clearer idea of the benefits of science to society in the areas of medicine or engineering, than it does in the areas of managing natural resources or reducing environmental impacts. While the public frequently expresses concern about environmental problems, they often expect that science will eventually discover a technical fix for these problems, or they simply discount the ability of politicians to address these problems. If the discussion warrants it, I usually counter with my own impressions. The public or their lawmakers rarely read scientific results and at best, they learn about them through media translations. Researchers in general are quite interested in the social implications of their work but are frustrated by the lack of infrastructure that supports multidisciplinary research and its social applications. After this much discussion, I often switch to super-casual conversations.

Yes, these are only my superficial impressions, but they reflect a greater question of how science, policy, economy, and society can collaborate to address societal problems that extend past our present specific capacities in any one of these disciplines. Scientific evidence would qualify this question as not just an emerging one but also one necessary for survival of our societies. Fortunately and by necessity, this situation is changing due to new research initiatives and urgent environmental crises. The trajectory of the problem concerning Climate Change presents a good example. Over the last three decades, atmospheric research broadened from weather specific to gradually including land-use studies, ocean circulation, agricultural practices, and public policy. While the scientists were publishing their results, the information gradually entered public consciousness first as a curiosity and now as a global urgency. The concern expressed by governmental bodies has lagged behind that of science and has been very mixed - from outright denial to enthusiastic agreement.

The priorities for EU Research provide also a good example of this changing situation by strongly promoting research and technical development relative to Sustainable Development through multidisciplinary collaborative teams. In fact, the SPICOSA initiative originates from the fact that coastal ecosystems are under increasing human pressure while policy has not been able to respond properly to the resulting negative impacts. In response, we have proposed an innovative effort, based on Systems Theory, which treats the coastal zone as an integral functioning system (see Figure). Converting this idea into practice will allow us to focus more on how we can provide prognostic information and on how we can improve the ways research information is communicated to decision-makers and the public. The SPICOSA working hypothesis is that our present approach to managing our Coastal Zone resource needs a much improved, interactive feedback between the best interests of the natural-resource system and the society that benefits from it.

The rationale for an improved feedback derives from our understanding of complex systems. That is, in order that a dynamic system maintain stability, it relies on healthy feedback mechanisms that help it adjust to the external and internal changes to which it is exposed. The Figure illustrates two Information Feedback Loops. The thin green line traces the default loop, and the thick purple line traces the SPICOSA loop. The default loop only slowly forces policy to react to problems by waiting until the public becomes aware that the benefits derived from the users of the Coastal Zone ecosystems have diminished. At some point, these changes become irreversible or very costly to redress. The SPICOSA loop provides scientifically defendable information about these changes to decision-makers on a practical time-scale. The SPICOSA assessments will allow that policy can be precautionary regarding serious losses and make decisions based on cost-benefit analyses that optimize social and ecological long-term benefits. The Ecological-Social-Economic (ESE) Assessment box represents the central activity of SPICOSA. The small diamond boxes represent critical threshold constraints on the interactions between components of the system, which need to be properly represented for successful forecasting of policy scenarios.

Returning to my impressions from the public sometimes I hear the question of how is it that we can put a man on the moon but we cannot put food in the mouths of the one billion starving people on earth. The difference lies between solving a strictly technical problem and solving a complex-socioeconomic, technical problem. The transition to a more sustainable society is an enormous challenge for modern society, but one with benefits from its initiation. Sustainability cannot be forced upon a society nor can it be achieved without the will and understanding of the majority of the public. On one hand, SPICOSA is attempting to demonstrate a methodology for the transition and, on the other hand, to better communicate the problems and solutions to the public. Without trying, we won’t learn and without collaborating, we won’t converge to a solution. Wish us well.

On behalf of the SPICOSA Team, I would like to invite readers to follow our progress in this Newsletter, where they will find further casual conversations editorials and sequel articles on the SPICOSA approach and results and public participation.

2. SPICOSA progress

SPICOSA and the Ker-Babel™ Deliberation Matrix

On the 15th and 16th March, a Core Group meeting for Work Package 1 was organised in the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli in Venice. Some twenty participants from nine countries attended the meeting which was designed to work on the SPICOSA Stakeholder-Policy Mapping Users Manual and the Design Concepts and Operational Specifications for the decision support tool. Two persons from the Expert Review group also attended, in order to become more involved with the proceedings.

It was emphasised that the System Approach Framework would be the first systemic modelling to provide a better delivery of scientific knowledge to the general community in a participatory manner. One of the targets set for Work Package 1 is that scientific information can be incorporated such that society can make choices about coastal development and sustainability.

The way that we make use of current knowledge is more important than acquiring more knowledge. The Ker-BabelTM Deliberation Matrix (commonly referred to as ‘’the Cube’’) will serve as a model for the deliberation support tool to be developed under SPICOSA. It is a multi-stakeholder, multi-criteria framework for comparative assessment of the coastal zone. This cube has one axis devoted to the governance issues, a second axis devoted to the categories of stakeholders whilst the third axis is given over to scenarios of possible futures.

The use of this three-dimensional Matrix follows logically from a five-step process in the analytical assessment. Having defined the ‘’common problem’’, a structure is built for input and discussion based upon sustainability, quality performance, multiple bottom lines (essentially the governance issues). This basically says what can be done. The next stage identifies and mobilises which tools (i.e. models or processes) can be used following which the stakeholders are mobilised to use these tools. Finally, there is a multi-actor deliberation. Despite the seeming complexity of this analytical tool, it has been successfully used to solve conflicting fisheries and tourism problems in an international project in West Africa involving Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

For more information, visit http://kerdst.c3ed.uvsq.fr and http://www.spicosa.eu/kercoast/index.htm.

Interactive workshop highlighted challenges of SPICOSA work

From 20th to 22nd June 2007, an interactive workshop on the SPICOSA System Analysis Framework (SAF) took place in Barcelona, hosted by CSIC-ICM. This framework will integrate ecological, social and economic data. It will be used to explore the dynamics of coastal zone systems and potential consequences of alternative policy scenarios.

The event aimed at developing a common understanding of the principles of the systematic research methodology to be applied throughout the project. Elements of this methodology were presented by Node and Workpackage Leaders and then discussed in small groups and in plenary with team members representing 18 Study Site Applications (SSAs) of SPICOSA. Special focus was laid on the challenges of modelling socio-ecological systems, in particular:

• geographical scales often don’t match
• systems can react in a non-linear fashion
• systems are interconnected (the footprint of human behaviour in one location can be felt even in other continents). That is why it is not easy to draw boundaries for our work
• memory effects can make systems behave in a manner hard to predict (e.g. the phosphorus load in the Baltic Sea has not decreased although the input to the system has decreased)
• the system has choke points that are difficult to predict, but are crucial for the impact of governance.

By facing these challenges and understanding coastal zone systems, SPICOSA wants to find out when and how policy makers should act and how to mobilise knowledge, human capacity and collective learning.

Brainstorming at working group session

A role play made participants experience and observe how little influence science has on the decision making process and how important and difficult the definition of relevant issues is for policy making.

The participants raised a series of questions, which were discussed in group sessions:

• Can the methodology of economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services adequately integrate economic and ecological aspects? Won’t it undervalue ecological aspects? Are there alternative methods, e.g. multicriteria analysis?
• How do we deal with qualitative versus quantitative indicators, with conventional wisdoms, with uncertainty and fuzziness?
• Shall we be dogmatic or pragmatic about the goal of sustainability?
• How can we come up with common solutions while each of us is constrained by the social and cultural context of the various European countries we are living in?

The next opportunity to find more answers to these questions will be the Study Site Application workshop in Plymouth in September. At that time, the first volume of the Systems Approach Framework manual will have been drafted.

For more information about these issues, please contact the SPICOSA Scientific Coordinators Denis Bailly at bailly@mailhost.univ-brest.fr and/or Tom Hopkins at tom_hopkins@ncsu.edu.

Virtual Communication Workshop a success

End of June, 22 SPICOSA team members from 16 countries took part in a virtual workshop using a teleconferencing service, which allows the sharing of power point presentations through the internet. EUCC Mediterranean Centre was the organiser and facilitator. The participants represented the SPICOSA Study Site teams and leaders of work tasks that also deal with communication issues. The aim was to brief them about efficient methods of communicating SPICOSA messages and results to the coastal public and expert community and to facilitate the exchange of communication experience within the team.

Although it took a while for everybody to get connected to the conference and to feel comfortable with the technology, everybody was very satisfied in the end and pleasantly surprised about how well such an event can be conducted virtually, thereby saving substantial amounts of time, project resources, and CO₂ emissions. In fact, it is estimated that we managed to save 8000 EUR in project funds and in terms of CO₂, at least half of what an average European spends per year.

The power point presentations, a model press release, and the results of the brain storming sessions are posted on the internal SPICOSA site.

For more information about the technology, visit www.disy.net or send an e-mail to Maria Ferreira, EUCC- Mediterranean Centre, m.ferreira@eucc.net

SPICOSA on-line

The SPICOSA project website at www.spicosa.eu was launched in February 2007 and quickly turned into a popular homepage. It aims at making the SPICOSA process accessible to the interested public, the coastal management practitioners community, and researchers.

A visit to the website introduces you to SPICOSA aims and objectives, partners, the Study Site Applications, as well as expected results and outputs. Given the wide variety of participants and countries represented in this project, summary information is available in eight European languages (other language versions are under development), as well as a full version of the website in German.

The website also provides space for information on the linkage with the Coastal Wiki of the ENCORA project, on the development of the deliberation tool KerCoast, and on simulation outputs. A news alert draws you immediately to the most recent announcements, results, and downloadable documents.

This public website forms the entry point to internal, management related information and the SPICOSA archive through a login function.

Try it out at www.spicosa.eu

3. Topical Issues

Simulation software for the Systems Approach Framework

SPICOSA´s primary research goal is on simulating how complex Coastal Zone systems change with respect to a wide range of changes in the use and management of these systems and, in return, how changes in the natural systems generate changes in the economic and social sectors. This requires that we understand and simulate an entire Coastal Zone system well enough to provide decision-makers with the best-possible information on “what-if scenarios" for implementing Sustainable Development in coastal zones.

To achieve this, we are using the simulation software EXTEND™, which has a number of characteristics critical to our needs. Extend can be used and understood by the entire range of our participants, from researchers to policy makers, making it a powerful common language for demonstrating and visualizing our simulations. Recently, SPICOSA project partners attended a training course in Mol (Belgium) organized by our partner VITO. This training aimed to inform in particular the partners representing the Study Site Applications about the use, applications, and capabilities of Extend. It will be repeated in November and followed by more advanced courses. A users group will be organized in conjunction with the European Extend provider, 1point2, in Grenoble. In addition, a set of tutorial models designed for training Coastal Zone professionals will be available on the SPICOSA public web site soon. Look for an example in our next issue!

4. Announcements

List of upcoming events

5th IAHR International Symposium on ‘River, Coastal and Estuarine Morphodynamics’
Date: 17 - 21 September 2007
Website: http://rcem2007.utwente.nl/
Place: Enschede, NETHERLANDS

9th International Conference on Nearshore and Estuarine Cohesive Sediment Transport Processes, INTERCOH'07
Date: 25 - 28 September 2007
Website: www.ifremer.fr/intercoh2007/
Place: Brest, FRANCE

European Symposium on Marine Protected Areas as a Tool for Fisheries Management and Ecosystem Conservation
Date: 25 - 28 September 2007
Website: www.mpasymposium2007.eu
Place: Murcia, SPAIN

OCEANS 2007
Date: 29 September - 04 October 2007
Website: www.oceans07mtsieeevancouver.org/
Place: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, CANADA

ICCD 07
International Conference on Management and Restoration of Coastal Dunes
Date: 03 - 05 October 2007
Website: www.iccd07.com/eng/invitacion.html
Place: Santander, SPAIN

CoastGIS 07
8th International Symposium on GIS and Computer Mapping for Coastal Zone Management.
Date: 08 - 10 October 2007
Website: www.coastgis07.com/eng/invitacion.html
Place: Santander, SPAIN

5. SPICOSA Study Sites

The Project will test and improve its methodology, the System Approach Framework (SAF) at various sites in a limited, real-time configuration. We have chosen eighteen Study Site Applications (SSAs) all over Europe for this purpose. In each issue of this SPICOSA Newsletter, we will introduce some study sites.

Guadiana River Estuary – an important resource base since ancient times

The estuary of the Guadiana River is located in the southeast of Portugal and separates Portugal from Spain. Guadiana is the fourth principal river of Iberia in terms of catchment area (67 000 km²) and length (810 km).

Guadiana estuary aerial view

The water of Guadiana is being discharged very irregularly, from nil during summer periods up to a reported 11000 m³ s-1 for the winter peak of 1876, before the construction of river dams. At present, there are 48 dams in the river catchment. The biggest one, Alqueva, has created the largest artificial lake in Europe. The impacts of the dam on the estuary and the neighbouring coastal area are being closely monitored, in particular potential decrease in sediment supply and in fresh water discharge.

Since antiquity, Guadiana River has played an important role as a communication route and supported very diversified economic activities, such as salt production in the solar ponds. In 1997, an international bridge across the river greatly increased economic and human exchange between the neighbouring regions of Algarve and Andalusia.

The development policies for both sides of the estuary are quite different. The Spanish side is under very rapid urban/tourist development, which recently added living space for an additional 40.000 inhabitants, mostly as secondary residences within the Esuri resort. Environmentalists have fought heavily against developers as the resort is located within the estuarine zone. On Portuguese side, the Castro Marim Natural Reserve, which is protected under Natura 2000, seriously limits construction activity and promotes a “greener economy”. Traditional, artisan salt production, eco-agriculture and nature tourism are growing. Curiously, the fact that the saltmarshes are protected under the Ramsar Convention delayed the functioning of a new sewage treatment plant and as a result untreated waste waters still enter the estuary.

These and several other environmental policy issues on both sides of Guadiana Estuary are to be analysed in an integrated way by SPICOSA and other accompanying initiatives.

Tomasz Boski, Guadiana estuary, Portugal SSA leader

Cork Harbour under pressure from increasing conflicting human activities

Cork Harbour, one of the world’s largest natural harbours, is of vital importance to the society and economy of Cork City and the surrounding region as well as to the overall national economy. It is a complex estuarine coastal system with a water body surface area of approximately 100km² on Ireland’s south coast. The principle riverine input is the 65km-long River Lee, which drains a catchment of about 1,200km². The Lee passes through Cork City at the upper tidal reaches, into the navigable Upper Harbour area, which is dominated by strong estuarine influences. The waterway continues through two narrow channels around Great Island before opening out into the expansive Lower Harbour. The entrance to the Harbour at Roche’s Point is a narrow channel, just 1.3 km wide.

Cork Harbour map

The mixed coastline consists of built infrastructure, shallow cliffs, intertidal mudflats, reedbeds, shingle and rocky foreshores exposed by the 3-4m tidal range. Cork Harbour’s saltmarsh, reedbed and mudflat habitats are important areas for migrating and wintering waterfowl and wading bird populations. The Harbour is home to several protected mammals, including the otter (Lutra lutra) and occasional cetacean visitor, particularly bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Harbour waters are also important fish spawning and nursery areas. There are several designated protected wetland areas of national and international importance in Cork Harbour, including Special Protected Areas, Special Areas of Conservation, national Natural Heritage Areas, and a Ramsar Site.

The social and economic dimensions of Cork Harbour are characterised by several concentrated urban areas, principally Cork City (population c. 123,000), but also rapidly growing towns such as Cobh and increasing urban (residential and retail) sprawl. These are set in a rural landscape of mixed crop and livestock agricultural land use, crossed by an extensive road infrastructure. There are widespread pockets of industrial development and enterprise zones dominated by the chemical, (bio)pharmaceutical and technology industries.

Cork Harbour’s long and culturally rich maritime tradition stems from its naturally sheltered environment and navigable deep-water channels. Today, the waterway is used routinely by merchant and naval shipping (the Irish Naval Service is based in the Lower Harbour) and for recreational boating, which is increasing in popularity. The strategic location of the Port of Cork – which handled 9.7 million tonnes of goods during 2006 – and the redevelopment the City docklands for business and residential use have resulted in plans to simultaneously expand and relocate port infrastructure. The local economy is benefiting from recent growth in cruise liner traffic, which berth at the historic town of Cobh. The 2007 cruise season will see 41 visits by 26 liners carrying some 45,000 passengers worth an estimated €35 million.

Other key human activities associated with Cork Harbour are recreation and tourism, maritime heritage, sea angling, commercial fisheries (salmon, sea trout, eels and oysters), and waste management. There are several contaminated coastal brownfield sites that are awaiting remediation and redevelopment following the closure of industry.

Contemporary policy issues relate to water quality issues and competing uses of both the waterway and coastal zone land. For example, the recent implementation of a major urban wastewater treatment system for Cork City has significantly improved water quality in the Upper Harbour. Nevertheless, high levels of nutrients from agricultural fertiliser use are still entering the River Lee and Cork Harbour. The Port development has implications concerning the carrying capacity of existing road infrastructure. Visually-appealing locations along the coastline are highly sought after by developers, both for residential property and marinas. Other policy issues concern future climate change (particularly the impacts of increasing storm surge and riverine flooding on Cork City) and population growth (i.e. increased urbanisation and infrastructure).

Overall, Cork Harbour is a fine example of a complex, coastal, social-ecological system under pressure from increasing, competing and conflicting human activities, as well as from macro-economic forces and effects, such as increased use of ship transport. Cork Harbour issues tend to be cross-cutting and cross-scale (e.g. local development in the coastal zone must conform to national planning strategies and EU Directives, as well as take into consideration potential future impacts of climate change). Policy responses tend to be reductionist and sectoral. “Systems thinking” is currently lacking in governance and management, which limits adaptive capacity for dealing with change. However, through the auspices of the EU INTERREG IIIB project COREPOINT (Coastal Research & Policy Integration, http://corepoint.ucc.ie), led by the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre (http://cmrc.ucc.ie) in University College Cork, a multi-stakeholder Cork Harbour Forum was recently established to promote and facilitate improved management of Cork Harbour as a resource and to provide an opportunity for dialogue and networking whilst highlighting the benefits of ICZM. The emergence of such a participatory mechanism with representation from across the Cork Harbour community bodies well for eventual adoption and implementation of a systems approach and for the future sustainability of Cork Harbour (www.corkharbour.ie).

Andy Scollick, Cork Harbour, Ireland SSA Team

6. SPICOSA National News

COLOPHON

SPICOSA NEWS is a newsletter produced by the SPICOSA consortium for professionals dealing in one way or another with coastal science, planning, and management. It is to be published every four months. The next issue is due in October 2007.

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