Abstract

Starting with an international LOICZ workshop near Oslo in 2009 to which 40 international experts from wide ranging disciplines including economics, social sciences and natural sciences had been invited a special issue in Estuarine and Coastal Shelf Science has recently been published featuring highlights of their findings. The discussions explicitly tried to overcome traditional fragmentation in thinking about coastal change, globalization and adaptation. The idea was – by applying a concept loosely following the so called Dahlem Conferences – to encourage out of the box thinking and cross disciplinary discussions; everyone came well prepared and instead of presentations moderated discussions in changing working group arrangements built the backbone of the conference.

The 6 papers that finally resulted and which have recently been published span a broad scope of coastal issues starting with coastal squeeze and the increasing dilemma of integrated management concepts being pushed by global drivers and competing interests while expected to provide local or regional solutions. Issues of addressing the right scale in time and space in coastal change social ecological system research and concrete questions of assessment and monitoring as well as coastal urbanisation are discussed in the wider context of globally and regionally emerging coastal syndromes.

Thus the introductory paper which outlines the coastal "squeeze" trapping" around 45% of the world population in the coast between the "Devil and the Deep blue Sea” features the current discussion around new concepts for adaptation to global change. The papers though originating in 2009 have seen continued iterations and are of high significance for both the ICSU and ISSC Visioning process that resulted in the 5 Grand Challenges onto which they map in various aspects. They also reflect current discussions on priorities for the FUTURE EARTH: RESEARCH FOR GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY CONCEPT.