The Route to Coastal Restoration: From the REST-COAST project to the Black Sea region

ARPHA Preprints, doi: 10.3897/arphapreprints.e140142

Elpida Besi^‡, Georgia Chantzi^‡, Florian Grossmann^§, Agustín Sánchez-Arcilla^|, Rositsa Stoeva^¶

‡ International Center for Black Sea Studies, Athens, Greece§ Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain| Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain¶ Black Sea Economic Cooperation, Istanbul, Turkiye

Corresponding author: Rositsa Stoeva ( rstoeva@bsec-organization.org )

This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Besi E, Chantzi G, Grossmann F, Sánchez-Arcilla A, Stoeva R (2024) The Route to Coastal Restoration: From the REST-COAST project to the Black Sea region. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e140142

Abstract

Within the REST-COAST (Large scale RESToration of COASTal ecosystems through rivers to sea connectivity) project, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) is a partner focused on the Black Sea region, where the project has Foros Bay as a prominent Pilot Site. Nevertheless, the project features Pilot Sites across Europe spanning West Europe (Arcachon Bay, Rhone Delta and Ebro Delta), North Europe (Wadden Sea and Vistula Lagoon) and East-Central Europe (Venice lagoon, Sicily Lagoons and Nahal Dalia). The project, as summarised in this booklet, investigates the technical, financial, planning, management, governance, and engagement aspects required for large scale coastal restoration. Which technical possibilities are there? What are the political and financial hurdles? How can they be overcome? To find answers, we combine field data, numerical tools and stakeholder requirements to enhance the application of coastal restoration in the nine project Pilots and beyond. The present booklet reports the application of project insights to the Black Sea region and discusses how some of REST-COASTs strategies can be efficiently transferred there.

Keywords

biodiversity, ecosystem services, Black Sea, coastal restoration