COASTAL - Collaborative Land-Sea Integration Platform at the Black Sea

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme COASTAL is a research and innovation project (2018-2022), a unique multi- actor collaboration of coastal and rural business entrepreneurs, administrations, stakeholders, and natural and social science experts to formulate and evaluate business solutions and policy recommendations aimed at improving the coastal-rural synergy to foster rural and coastal development while preserving the environment (https://h2020-coastal.eu/). The overarching objective of COASTAL is to improve the rural-coastal synergies in strategic business and policy decision making and collaboration between coastal and rural actors. This is achieved by developing, demonstrating and applying a generic toolset and performance indicators by combining a multi-actor approach with system dynamics. The COASTAL project contributes to integrated coastal-rural planning and coastal- rural synergy in the case study regions (one being the Danube’s Mouths – Black Sea) and the wider EU territory; develops a durable, online platform for knowledge exchange about coastal-rural synergy with concrete examples and tools for supporting land-sea collaboration dynamics modelling. This allows us to understand the interactions with market, demographic, environmental and climate forecasts, and quantify the positive and negative Externalities.