Malcolm Burrows

At the international level, there is an increasing awareness that many of the environmental problems that our civilisation has brought upon itself are either focused on the shorelines or most obvious in their vicinity. Fertiliser run-off from agricultural lands produces eutrophication of coastal waters, marine litter washes up on Norway’s otherwise flawless beaches, and disoriented whales as well as dead sea turtles are brought ashore by the tides, while oil spills, such as the one from the Deep Water Horizon disaster in April 2010, threaten coastal ecosystems. A recent report released by the European Environment Agency (EEA), Balancing the future of Europe’s coasts (http://www.eea.europa.eu/ publications/balancing-the-future-ofeuropes), summarises the economic importance of the coasts and the pressures that they are exposed to and calls for a concerted effort to manage these conflicting interests. A previous effort, the EU’s Recommendation on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), dates from 2002, but the new report finds that its implementation across the EU is no better than 50%, which it blames on lack of clear administrative responsibilities for coastal matters. A new directive aiming to clear up the red tape is underway. Meanwhile, an important issue highlighted by the report is the coordinated collection and use of highquality geo-spatial data concerning the environmental health of coastal regions. Combining diverse and non-matching regional datasets to build an integrated high-technology mapping effort, as provided recently for forests on a global scale (Curr. Biol. (2014) 24, R1–R4), could transform the management of coastal areas as well as the research into coastal ecology. The report also announces that the EEA is currently developing a system of accounts to quantify ‘ecosystem capital’, such as fish stocks or biodiversity, and to track changes to this capital, e.g. from environmental degradation or over-exploitation. Similarly, the report also calls for vulnerabilities of coastal locations to be assessed and monitored, such as coastal erosion, eutrophication, or loss of sediment in the Venice lagoon. There is also scope for international research collaborations motivated by the shared problems of coastal regions around the world. For instance, the current EU Framework Programme, FP7, includes a project known as JERICO (Joint European Infrastructure for Coastal Observations, http://www.jerico-fp7. eu/), which runs until April 2015. The JERICO network aims “to build a solid and transparent organization towards an operational service for the timely, continuous and sustainable delivery of high quality environmental data and information products related to the marine environment in European coastal seas. This will give generic support to protect environment and biodiversity, understand climate change and better predict related impacts and facilitate the sustainable exploitation of marine resources.” The collaborative project uses a number of robotic monitoring devices such as Argo floats and remote-control gliders. It also aims at improving data compatibility in the field.