SUSTAIN

This is a pan-European project to develop a universal tool to deliver sustainability on Europe’s coasts. The project, part funded by the EU ERDF under the Interreg IVC programme, ran for 3 years from 2010 to December 2012. It involved 12 partners from 11 members states (UK, Netherlands, France, Italy, Slovenia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Portugal and Spain).

The SUSTAIN project is all about assessing sustainability and strengthening operational policy on the coast and we have been working on development of a self-assessment sustainability toolkit for coastal local authorities. Partners also shared best practice on a range of coastal management issues and some of the shared experience is already being implemented by other partners.

In England the work was led by Sefton Council working with the NWCF as ‘external experts’. In addition to the core project work we also led on communications work for the project and the final international conference “Delivering Sustainable Coasts” – which was held in Southport in September 2012 (18-20) in conjunction with the Forum’s biennial regional coastal conference.

The programme, attendance and presentations from the Delivering Sustainable Coasts conference are now available to download below

Morning presentations:

Mayors and civic dignitaries from Alba Adriatica, Tortoreto, Martinsicuro, Roseto degli Abruzzi and Silvi, Italy signing a formal agreement to provide SUSTAIN indicator information to the Province of Teramo’s new Regional Observatory

Patrick McCluskey, Down District Council: SUSTAIN transfer of best practice on plastics in the marine environment

Assessing-Sustainability-using-the-SUSTAIN-indicator-toolkit.pdf (2035 downloads ) with the spreadsheets illustrating the SUSTAIN indicator toolkit: SUSTAIN-Scoring_Provincie-Zuid-Holland_Netherlands.xls (1954 downloads ) and SUSTAIN-Scoring_Provincie-Zuid-Holland_Netherlands-zero.xls (2030 downloads )

Afternoon presentations – Local Initiatives

SUSTAIN-practice-transfer-Down-District-Council-plastics-in-the-marine-environment.pdf (2102 downloads ) & supplementary image: SUSTAIN-practice-transfer-Down-District-Council-supplementary-image.pdf (1991 downloads )

Annie Heslop, Fylde BeachCare

Afternoon presentations – Regional Initiatives

The conference was followed by a full day field trip to the Sefton coast taking in National Trust work on erosion at Formby Point, the Sefton Coast Landscape Partnership Scheme’s volunteer project on archaeology at Formby Point, Sefton’s Biodiversity and Access Project – a social inclusion project, Southport town centre regeneration and the RSPB’s Hesketh Outmarsh managed realignment scheme (just over the adminstrative border in West Lancashire!)

All the project outputs are now availble to download below, along with newsletters and an information flyer about the project. Please feel free to share the project outputs and to use the indicator toolkit. If you would like any help or to discuss the project outputs please contact Caroline Salthouse at the North West Coastal Forum.

Please note that following a slightly problematic transfer of this site to a new server the outputs below are temporarily not available to download from this site but can be obtained from www.sustain-eu.net. They will be put back on here in early April. Apologies for any inconvenience in the meantime.

To find out more visit www.sustain-eu.net.