Collaborative Citizen Science to Support Coastal Management

Coastal communities in North West England face numerous anthropogenic challenges, including high vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, namely enhanced coastal erosion and flooding from sea level rise (Sayers et al., 2022), and marine litter. To manage heightening climate impacts, Flood and Coastal Management has transitioned from a defence to risk-based management, including a focus on building coastal system resilience through Nature-based Solutions (NbS) rather than physical defences. Building the resilience of people, including coastal communities, is critical to this transition, whereby their voices are heard and they can better prepare for these risks (EA, 2020). However, despite the strategic intent to engage and involve people, public participation in practice has been restricted by numerous challenges, perpetuating a continued lack of public involvement in decision making or resilience building.

This interdisciplinary project investigates whether such a deficit in public engagement in decision making can be overcome through a case study citizen science project called Coast Watchers at Rossall on the North West coast, which aims to collaboratively engage people in monitoring and responding to coastal challenges. The research embarked on several study phases to iteratively design, test and evolve the citizen science project collaboratively, involving various coastal monitoring activities and social science investigations. Results suggest that it is important to account for people’s local coastal values, motivations and concerns (Earl et al., 2022) when designing a collaborative approach to public engagement.

Crucially, the work explores the extent to which coastal communities can be engaged beyond citizen science monitoring and become active participants in a resilient and collaborative coastal management. The talk will present outcomes from a series of interviews with coastal practitioners and community members in the North West, exploring the challenges and opportunities for communities to be more involved in a collaborative coastal management. Findings will be discussed within a wider context, whereby they are contributing towards a Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Project, Our Future Coast (EA, 2022), which seeks to engage people in adaptation planning and co-designing NbS to better protect coastal communities around the North West coast from current and future challenges.

 

References

Earl, J., Gormally-Sutton, A., Ilic, S. and James, M.R. (2022). ‘Best day since the bad germs came’: Exploring changing experiences in and the value of coastal blue space during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Fylde Coast case study. Coastal Studies & Society, 1(1), pp.97-119.

Environment Agency (2020) National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-flood-and-coastal-erosion-risk-management-strategy-for-england--2. [14/9/23]

Environment Agency (2022) Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme. https://engageenvironmentagency.uk.engagementhq.com/innovation-programme. [7/2/23]

Sayers, P., Moss, C., Carr, S. and Payo Garcia, A. (2022) Responding to climate change around England's coast: the scale of the transformational challenge. Ocean & Coastal Management, 225.