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Sustainable development indicators for the coastal zone management
Date Issued |
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2011 |
Increasing pressure on coastal areas arising from more intensive marine use stimulates conflicts among different stakeholders in coastal regions. Different demands in using land and marine coastal components need to be balanced in a multi sectoral perspective. Therefore application of ICZM principles seems to be the optimal economical and legal instrument for minimising possibilities of conflicts. 27 sustainable development indicators, established by EU have been widely applied for ICZM in many European coastal regions. Indicator based approach to evaluating coastal zone development allows to make comparisons between different coastal regions as well as between coastal zone and hinterland. Such approach also has to provide the reliable information on state of the coastal zone in each separate region, thus supporting the quality of coastal management decisions. The Sustainable Development indicators for ICZM (SDI4SEB) in the South Eastern Baltic region project was carried out in order to assess the state of the coastal zone using EU recommended set of indicators. Analysed indicators are the signpoins, describing the current state of the coastal zone management. Also being interconnected to each other indicators have the additional value when speaking about understanding such a complex system as the coastal zone. However, project implementation revealed that sustainable development indicators may require some improvements and adaptation to regional specifics. Insufficient data, imprecise requirements or lack of national regulations suggested to revise the chosen indicator’s set and to think about the development of more region specific indicators, also reserving the possibility of benchmarking EU coastal regions.