Site visit to one of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated tourist attractions, the Giant’s Causeway.

The site “The ICZM training schools have provided an excellent and valuable experience not just for me but for our
is managed by the National Trust and the training group looked at a wide combination of instruments regional stakeholders and partners. The involvement in the Schools has also had a strongly positive effect on
needed to maintain the heritage and wilderness values while ensuring accessibility to as wide a part this region’s approach to how it manages its coastal resource.”
of society as possible.
Niall Benson, from Durham Heritage Coast Partnership and participant at the Severn Estuary training course

Training the professionals Cutting across the issues

As part of Corepoint’s commitment to
build capacity for ICZM on the
ground, a series of two day training
courses were developed and delivered
across North West Europe to help
coastal professionals get to grips with
the key principles of ICZM in practice.
Jeremy Hills from Envision, a research
consultancy and partner organisation
of Corepoint, was heavily involved in
the development of the courses. “We
were interested in bringing practical
skills into what could be perceived as
an academic based project”, says Hills.
“The academic community has long
since embraced ICZM with much
excitement and enthusiasm. The
reality on the ground, however, is
different with many professionals
working in local authorities,
responsible for implementation, not
having a clue about ICZM. It’s not
on their radar in the same way.”
The training courses set out to change
that, focusing on the EU approved
principles of ICZM as the course
platform, and using the multinational
skills of partners to create practical
case studies to show best practice in
ICZM. Unique to the training was
the integrated approach taken, not
looking at specific sectors for example
as in the case with much ICZM
training but dividing the information
by principles, cutting across sectors
and issues.
“For each course, we selected and
focused on the principles that were
most appropriate for the local area in
terms of issues”, comments Hills. “In
Port Rush, Northern Ireland, for
example a key issue was planning and
housing development in coastal areas.
We took that to be an issue of local
specificity and went out to look at
planning and the problem with
planning law. This, coupled with a
visit to a site to illustrate the
principles, made them real and
most importantly, relevant to the
participants.”
“Our pool of expertise from our
partners allowed us to take examples
from various locations and show them
to be relevant in other areas dealing
with similar issues. Dolphin stranding
in Holland, for example, was an eye
opener in courses we ran elsewhere.”
CoastWeb
As well as specific regional work,
Corepoint also undertook a number
of more overarching projects.
Through Corepoint partner CoastNet,
the project ran eight conferences
throughout North West Europe
focusing on specific aspects of ICZM.
In addition, CoastNet developed the
coastal portal CoastWeb.
Says Alex Midlen, CoastNet’s Strategic
Director “CoastNet wanted to improve
access to information for decision-
making in coastal areas. It's about
joining up separate sources, about
making all that ‘grey’ literature
(un-published reports) available for all
to use, about connecting up internet
based sources of information and
sifting the good from the bad.
Corepoint enabled us to realise the
first stage in this vision with the
construction and launch of CoastWeb,
an online archive and news resource.”
A considerable achievement of the
Corepoint project has been to link
CoastWeb with other digital
initiatives at European level.
CoastWeb, for example, provides a
structure and a home for background
information for the new Coastal
Wikipaedia. This has been developed
by the Encora project, of which
CoastNet is a Partner and Corepoint
an Associate Network. This hopefully
marks the start of a shared coastal and
maritime information infrastructure
for Europe.
ICZM EU indicator
As well as reviews and reports looking
at various aspects of ICZM, Corepoint
also tested at a local level the EU
indicator to measure progress in the
implementation of integrated coastal
zone management in Europe.
Says Alan Pickaver of EUCC, the
Corepoint partner responsible for the
work, “We wanted to test this
indicator at the local level, to get
some first hand feedback from local
users. We organised a number of
workshops with our Corepoint
partners in Wales, France, Belgium,
Ireland and England.”
“The work allowed us to test
the indicator in a focused way giving
us some indication of ICZM
implementation in Europe. There
certainly is clear evidence that ICZM
is progressing.”
“Now we are hoping to do more work
through Corepoint’s successor Imcore
dividing the EU indicator actions into
steps, giving it greater sophistication
and relevance”.

14 The edge Spring 2008 The edge Spring 2008 15