Coastal Ocean Assessment for Sustainability and Transformation
COAST Card is an innovative stakeholder-driven tool that monitors, forecasts, and reports the effectiveness of management decisions on coastal and ocean sustainability. Massive changes in climate, population, pollution, and consumption patterns place coastal and ocean systems at increasing risk, so a new set of robust and transformative tools are needed to produce well-balanced policies that will lead to improving environmental resources at a global scale. COAST Cards will do this by merging three tools: a) status assessment through a report card process, b) societal guidance provided through social network analyses, and c) prioritized actions identified with system dynamics models. The synergistic impact of merging these three approaches into the COAST Card will enable forecasting the effectiveness of future management regimes on coastal ecological, economic and social aspects. Project outputs include dynamic COAST Cards for Chesapeake Bay (USA) and Manila Bay (Philippines), development of a training program and framework for implementing COAST Cards in Tokyo Bay and Ishigaki Island (Japan) and the Goa coast (India). A broad dissemination plan includes science communication products, peer review papers, teaching and training and an interactive learning environment so that the COAST Card approach can be emulated throughout the world. The process of co-developing a COAST Card brings together different stakeholders including: a) social sciences/humanities/economy, b) natural sciences/technology, and c) societal partners (i.e. citizens, industry, decision-makers, civil society organizations) to work together to co-produce new knowledge that can serve as the foundation for social learning. New and powerful collaborations will promote behavior change and collective action to accelerate the sustainable and equitable use of oceans and coastal systems in an era of rapid global change.
Principal Investigator(s)
William Dennison, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, United States
Partners
Rhodora Azanza, The Marine Science Institute - University of the Phillipines Diliman, Phillipines
Pal Ingebrigt Davidsen, University of Bergen, Norway
Dattesh Desai, CSIR - National Institute of Oceanography, India
Kazuo Nadaoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Sponsors
Ministry of Earth Sciences, India
Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan
Research Council of Norway, Norway
Department of Science and Technology, Philippines
National Science Foundation, United States