Measuring Coastal Sustainability: The Sustain Policy Tool

Project Implementation Period:

October 2010 - October 2012

Specific Funding Programme:

INTERREG IVC programme (Innovation & Environment Regions of Europe Sharing Solutions): European Regional Development Fund

Budget:

1,8 Mio EUR

About the Project:

SUSTAIN has been a 3-year project addressing environment and risk prevention (Priority 2 of the programme) and the sub-theme water mangement. The project created a fully implementable policy tool to support coastal authorities and communities in their sustainable management. This tool is applicable to all 22 coastal states of the European Union. It is based on a set of easily measurable sustainability indicators that were developed and assessed during the lifetime of the project to enable authorities to measure effectively the sustainability of our coasts.

SUSTAIN Indicator Set

The indicators have been chosen to cover distinct issues within the four recognisable pillars of sustainabilty, i.e. Governance, Economics, Environmental Quality and Social Well-being. Two types of indicators are available: core and optional indicators to reflect locally specific situations which can vary throughout Europe's regions. A checklist approach has been introduced in respect of the Governance pillar, rather than indicators which are difficult to measure.

DeCyDe-for-Sustainability tool

Data for the relevant indicators is fed into a policy tool, the DeCyDe-for-Sustainability. This is a user-friendly, spreadsheet tool that allows the core indicators to be scored numerically, to suppport the self-assessment and to determine, whether an authority is moving towards a sustainable management. The tool was implemented through participatory workshops with discussion about the issues, indicators and data.

To sum up, the SUSTAIN Indicator Set and the DeCyDe-for-Sustainabiltiy tool constitute a use-friendly, rapid implementation, self-assessment tool which respects the time constraints of policy-makers and other stakeholders.

SUSTAIN publications

Apart a DeCyDe-for-Sustainabilty brochure, several reports and guides have been published:

Measuring Coastal Sustainability, a guide for self-assessment of sustainability using indicators and a means of scoring them
Transferring Coastal Sustainability, a good practice and policy report
Improving Coastal Sustainability, a guide presenting lessons learned from the SUSTAIN partnership
Scoring Coastal Sustainability, a report on the sustainability criteria scoring and their assessment

Workshops and inter-regional exchange visits

Six workshops explored and discussed sustainabilitiy topics, criteria and methodologies for measurement of indicators (see Figure 1 and website):

sustain_workshops_screen_shot.png

Also six inter-regional exchange visits enabled partners to exchange experiences on sustainability issues including the transfer of best practices (see Figure 2 and website):