Abstract:
Coastal communities around the Atlantic face rising seas, more frequent extreme events and degrading ecosystems. Relevant scientific knowledge often exists, yet it rarely reaches the places where adaptation decisions are made, while local and traditional knowledge seldom informs scientific practice.
BEACONSplus, a Horizon Europe Innovation Action coordinated by ZMT and involving 15 partners from 11 countries (July 2026 to December 2029), addresses this gap by scaling the All-Atlantic Network of Coastal Resilience Beacon Sites, established under the All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA), to at least 31 sites.
The project is guided by the question of what coastal resilience means, for whom, and in what ways. A co-designed similarity index connects communities with comparable hazard and vulnerability profiles, enabling structured peer learning from successes and failures alike. High-resolution climate projections are downscaled to individual sites, ombining regional ocean models with AI-based methods that also quantify uncertainty. In parallel to societal resilience, and based on a co-created definition of resilience, ecosystem resilience will be monitored and quantified. Ecosystem Co-Design aligns nature-based solutions with societal needs, while Indigenous, traditional and local knowledge is integrated through a consent-based repository and community-led storytelling. Through the Atlantic Together initiative, a multimedia campaign launched with an Atlantic Together Day, coastal communities share their own resilience stories, with the aim of reaching more than one million people. These strands converge in the All-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Hub, which links the Network to European and global knowledge platforms.
The seminar concludes by addressing long-term continuity: how a time-limited project can establish a durable legacy for the Network, and how ZMT research groups can contribute to and benefit from it.