This case study examines the governance of public access to Albania’s Adriatic and Ionian coastline as a representative instance of institutional fragmentation and regulatory volatility in Mediterranean coastal-zone management. Albania’s Constitution treats the seashore as subject to a distinct public property regime, and a 2019 regulation guaranteed a minimum free-access share of 20% of every 1,000-m coastal segment. That share was raised to 30% in 2024, and the underlying instrument was itself further amended in January 2026, three iterations within 7 years, none through primary legislation. Drawing on documentary legal analysis and the comparative integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) literature, the case study finds that the practical obstacle to consistent enforcement of this entitlement is not the absence of statutory ambition but the fragmentation of implementing competence among the National Coastal Agency, an advisory coordinating committee, the National Territorial Council and coastal municipalities, none of which holds binding authority to resolve conflicts between them. This article evaluates this arrangement critically against comparative findings on ICZM integration and against the public trust doctrine, and situates it alongside comparable Croatian and Italian experience. It concludes with three field recommendations, each considered alongside its principal implementation hurdle: consolidating the pending coastal-zone framework law into a single instrument with binding conflict-resolution authority; instituting independently verifiable, spatially explicit monitoring of concession boundaries; and embedding prior, rather than retrospective, community consultation consistent with the Aarhus Convention.

The expansion of aquaculture often faces challenges related to environmental impacts and social acceptance, particularly when involving exotic species. In Argentina, where marine aquaculture remains marginal, recent proposals for salmonid farming in Tierra del Fuego province (TDF) have sparked public debate, balancing economic development against environmental concerns. In response, the local government enacted Law 1135/2021, banning salmonid farming in the province. This study explores public attitudes toward exotic salmonid aquaculture in TDF using a mixed-methods approach, combining press discourse analysis with an extensive online survey. Results indicate strong public resistance to net-pen salmonid farming in the Beagle Channel, especially among TDF residents and individuals linked to environmental sciences. In contrast, land-based aquaculture and farming of native species receive more support. Most respondents doubt the economic benefits of salmonid farming, and nearly 80% of TDF residents support the ban. Notably, while there is strong opposition to new exotic introductions, most respondents do not support eradication of established salmonid populations, which are widely accepted due to their long-standing presence and importance for recreational fishing. These findings reflect the nuanced views of the local community and emphasize the need for socially informed and transparent regulatory frameworks for aquaculture development in ecologically sensitive regions.

Saltmarshes along the United States South Atlantic Coast, and globally, face critical threats from sea-level rise, edge erosion, ponding and historical human modifications, all of which are exacerbated by sediment deficits. Uncontaminated sediment stored in confined disposal facilities (CDFs) represents a significant and often overlooked resource for marsh restoration. As a result of management practices in the second half of the twentieth century, many unnaturally high earthen structures occur adjacent to drowning saltmarshes in the United States. In this perspective article, we explore the potential for mining CDFs to provide the sediment necessary to restore and sustain at-risk saltmarshes. Using publicly available data from the US South Atlantic coast, we estimate that reclaiming sediment from existing CDFs could offset sea-level rise impacts by 2100 for 13% of South Atlantic marshes. While the potential benefit is substantial, scientific, planning and implementation hurdles are presented. These pitfalls include potential issues with sediment characterization, limited guidance on chemical evaluation to reduce environmental risks, construction complications due to soft soils and legal and financial considerations. Despite these barriers, we conclude with a path forward for researchers and practitioners to address the hurdles through dedicated case studies, adaptive management principles and stakeholder engagement.

The rapid expansion of the blue economy sector, now employing millions worldwide, reveals a growing gap between technological ambition and human capacity. Despite the sector’s promise, ocean literacy remains critically low, and young people often lack pathways to participate in sustainable ocean careers. Addressing this gap requires investment in accessible, interdisciplinary training to develop the blue skills essential for future ocean sustainability. Here we highlight the urgent need to invest in blue skills and foster a new generation of interdisciplinary, creative and socially engaged ocean professionals. Using an island in the Atlantic Ocean (Madeira) as a model environment, we introduce the emerging concept of a Blue Skills Academy, a cost-effective and inclusive educational programme designed to empower youth through experiential learning that bridges ocean science, several fields of engineering, social sciences, arts and leadership skills. We outline how the Blue Skills Academy programmes can form the foundation of Blue Campuses; physical locations where education, research, innovation, entrepreneurship and community engagement converge around ocean-based opportunities. Key components of Blue Campuses include (1) academies that facilitate ocean-positive skills training and (2) physical spaces that foster the exchange of ideas across blue economy disciplines. Combined, the Blue Skills Academy and Blue Campuses can lead the way in ensuring sustainable ocean interactions are not merely an international policy ambition but something that any member of society can fully participate in. We believe investing in people and connections, more than just technology and businesses, is the missing link to achieving an equitable and responsible blue economy.

We use the Whale Safe initiative as a case study to investigate the efficacy of species distribution models (SDMs) for dynamic ocean management in a relatively data-rich context. This program combines SDMs, passive acoustic monitoring and opportunistic sightings data to help reduce whale-ship collisions off California, USA. Blue whale SDM predictions were significantly correlated with the in situ observations of whale presence (sightings and passive acoustic detections), suggesting that the model is a reliable source for indicating blue whale presence. We also demonstrated from this multiyear program the value of integrating multiple sources of inference (sightings, acoustics and SDMs) for achieving dynamic management. The results indicated the potential benefit of using validated SDMs in less data-rich regions to support dynamic ocean management when in situ real-time data sources are sporadic or unavailable.

The winter storms of January and February 2026 caused severe coastal damage along southwest England, reviving memories of the destructive 2013/14 winter and exposing persistent weaknesses in UK coastal resilience policy. Using the Slapton Sands gravel barrier system, in Devon, as a case study, this article argues that repeated damage to the village of Torcross and the A379 road section that runs along the barrier illustrates a broader national cycle of escalating coastal risk despite decades of scientific understanding and strategic planning through Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs). Although none of the winter 2026 storms were individually extreme, their rapid succession, sequencing, and coincidence with spring tides caused substantial erosion, infrastructure collapse, and property damage, highlighting the cumulative threat of compound events. The case study exemplifies how defended coastlines and transport corridors can function as “single points of failure,” where disruption produces cascading social and economic consequences. While SMPs acknowledge the eventual need for “Managed Realignment,” implementation remains slow, politically contentious, and operationally vague, with policy often defaulting to short-term “Hold the Line” responses. This creates an adaptation deficit between national ambitions for resilience and practical action on the ground. We emphasise that transformational adaptation – including managed realignment, infrastructure relocation and community transition – requires coordinated national leadership, statutory support, a consistent approach and socially just frameworks that prioritise participation and fairness. Current local and national governance structures remain insufficient to meet the pace and scale of climate-driven coastal change. Torcross, like many vulnerable coastal communities, serves as an early warning of broader systemic failure: sea-level rise and intensifying coastal hazards will increasingly force the UK to confront difficult choices about protection, retreat and relocation.

This perspective examines the application of transfer learning (TL) within deep learning (DL) frameworks for extreme water level (EWL) and spatiotemporal flood predictions. We discuss the main advantages of TL, such as enabling model transferability of pretrained DL models from/to diverse coastal-estuarine systems and reducing computational time compared to physics-based models. These advantages can accelerate the deployment of flood prediction models in data-limited locations. We also discuss challenges and limitations that hinder accurate pattern recognition and propagation of EWLs from gauge (observation) stations to surrounding locations within model domains. These limitations include dependence on similarity in data distributions, overfitting the training data and both lag and hysteresis effects in the timing of peak water levels and flood dynamics. Lastly, we explain several misconceptions and challenges in current DL approaches that hinder EWL and spatiotemporal flood prediction, including training models exclusively on extreme conditions, assessing accuracy solely through goodness-of-fit metrics, and connecting the model’s knowledge of input data with physical explanations of flood processes without an adequate context. We argue that these challenges can be addressed by prioritizing storm-relevant patterns of the input data features as well as embedding spatial propagation of EWLs in DL frameworks to mimic coastal-estuarine hydrodynamic models. Ultimately, progress toward generalizable model transferability relies on the modeler’s ability to incorporate physical understanding in DL architectures, alongside continued advances in physics-informed machine learning models via soft or hard constraint approaches. There remains substantial work to establish guidelines and/or formal procedures to develop robust, interpretable, and generalizable DL models for spatiotemporal flood prediction, thereby supporting effective flood management, mitigation, and emergency preparedness.

Barriers to ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA), which is part of the broader nature-based solutions (NbS) category, remain poorly understood and assessed. This article addresses this research gap, by proposing a structured analytical framework to understand barriers and applying it to 24 coastal EbA projects deployed in French tropical island territories. This framework considers four dimensions of barriers: categories, origins, impacts on the adaptation process, and temporalities. The findings highlight three main barriers relating to institutions, governance, politics, laws and regulations (35%); awareness, knowledge and technical resources (20%); and finance (15%). Most barriers are objective (80%), contextual (51.7%) and not adaptation specific (63.3%). Prevalent adaptation-specific barriers are the lack of or weakness of EbA-oriented policy and tools (59.5%) and lack of a future-oriented risk- and solution-based approach (27.0%). Most barriers (56.7%) affect two stages of the adaptation process (readiness and implementation) and were not overcome over the lifetime of the projects (53.3%). Thirteen solutions to barriers were implemented, with information, knowledge and awareness sharing or strengthening and increased coordination efforts being the most utilised and successful. This study highlights the benefits of including a barrier-oriented analysis in the evaluation of adaptation projects and proposes an operational and transferable framework to do so.

Urban coastal regions in the Great Lakes Basin are increasingly vulnerable to destructive flooding driven by climate impacts, outdated gray infrastructure systems, and a legacy of urban hydrological alteration and habitat fragmentation. While Nature-based Solutions (NbS) offer a path to adaptation, their implementation is often hindered by governance fragmentation, uneven regional resources, and a lack of integrated planning and design tools. This article discusses a transdisciplinary research through design framework that translates complex hydrological, ecological, and socio-spatial datasets into a suite of multimodal tools that serve as boundary objects for regional NbS planning in Southeast Michigan. The study’s core contribution is a transferable and translational methodology that bridges the gap between technical and institutional protocols, the practices of organizations stewarding existing green stormwater infrastructure projects, and the disparate experiences of flooding across urbanized watersheds. Findings show that the act of designing these tools as translational devices – such as interactive and thematic cartographies, actor-network diagrams, and sets of NbS and multispecies habitat cards – evidences a mode of inquiry that allows diverse actors to move from reactive control paradigms toward a relational framework for addressing regional interdependencies.

Awards and invited keynotes are critical markers of scholarly achievement that shape visibility, career advancement and retention in academia. Yet extensive evidence across science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine shows that women remain underrepresented among recipients of these honors. To evaluate equity within the coastal geosciences and engineering (CGE) community, we compiled the gender distribution of 1,138 awards and invited keynotes granted by professional societies and conferences relevant to CGE over the past 50 years. We additionally reviewed publicly available nomination and selection procedures to assess transparency and inclusivity in award processes. Overall, 65% of honors were presented to men, and 35% were awarded to women and gender-diverse recipients. While men received more than 90% of awards before 2000, female representation among honorees increased to an average of 42% since 2020, outpacing the growth of women in the global scientific workforce and in tenure-track positions in the physical sciences and engineering in the United States. Disparities persist, however, across organizations and career stages: late-career awards and invited keynotes remain disproportionately male-dominated. Most organizations publicly share eligibility criteria, but few provide information on committee composition, evaluation rubrics or conflict-of-interest policies. Our findings show substantial progress toward gender equity in CGE recognition, yet highlight continued gaps in senior-level honors and the transparency of selection procedures. We provide community-focused recommendations such as clearer nomination policies, actions to reduce implicit bias, improved record-keeping and expanded mid-career awards to support equitable recognition across career stages and to ensure that honors reflect the evolving diversity of the CGE workforce.