September 2012

The North Adriatic

The North Adriatic case site comprises the coastal zones of three different nations bordering the Upper Adriatic Sea with a coastline length of about 2,227 km and 1,502 km of islands. It includes, from south west, the coastal zone of 4 Italian Regions: Marche, Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia; the Slovenian coast, and that of 4 Croatian counties: Istria, Rijeka, Lika and Senj and Zadar.


The close proximity and ecological characteristics of this common region result on a broad range of coastal issues (mainly climate change impacts and decreasing water quality) that cut across jurisdictional lines requiring a broader perspective for management. This Case can assist the ICZM process by supporting the prioritization of areas at risk in need of implementing adaptation strategies due to their exposure to climate change and other coastal stressors.


Regarding water quality, the team is developing a short-term forecasting model called Beach Health Advisory Model (BHAM) to support coastal municipalities in the management and monitoring of bathing water quality. Furthermore, in order to understand the risk linked to climate change impacts on coastal zones, a Decision Support System (DSS) named DESYCO is also under development.


A selection of the Pegaso indicators will be used for the application of the Regional Risk Assessment in order to investigate the environmental risks related to multiple coastal stressors.


The participation tool has been used to involve relevant stakeholders to achieve several objectives regarding revision of methodological aspects, visualization and communication of results and discussions on its relations to policy strategies and plans in the framework of the ICZM Protocol. The main constraint concerning the use of the Pegaso tools is related to the limited data availability needed to calculate indicators as well as the scale of this information.


In the coming months, the activities to be developed will include the finalization of data collection, an update of the vulnerability matrix according to the present information; the expansion of the use of the decision support tool and performing the risk assessment for the selected coastal issues with the involvement of stakeholders.


The Case supervisor is Stefano Soriani, Ca` Foscari University of Venice.



More info: soriani@unive.it

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