Rethinking COASTal landSCAPES with climate-resilient interventions: systemic land-to-sea solutions
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.
Project Work Packages
1 Systemic land-coast-sea analyses under present & future conditions
2 Cross-sectoral evaluation and modelling of resilience solutions
3 Co-designed resilience solutions by empowered regions and communities
4 Replication and transfer of systemic resilience-through-adaptation scalable plans
5 Dissemination and communication for practical exploitation
6 Project management & cooperation for systemic climate resilience
SAMS' role
SAMS contributes to all Work Packages, under the leadership of Dr Dmitry Aleynik.
The modelling and biology research team (Aleynik, Szewczyk, Dale, Last) will focus on collating observational data and developing a regional high-resolution 3D coupled hydrodynamic-biogeochemical model. This will represent the waters of a mid-latitude Scottish Sea Loch supporting the investigation of the impact of different sea and land uses under climate change scenarios.
In collaboration with local stakeholders, an asset-based approach to the development of resilience strategies for coastal communities in Firth of Lorn region will be tested, led by Dr Suzi Billing. This will include a feedback loop between the information that key stakeholders require to create resilience strategies and the modelling and biology research team.
