Photo: Pegaso
PEGASO: PEople for Ecosystem-based Governance in Assessing Sustainable development of Ocean and coast
The Mediterranean and the Black Sea basins have, and continue to suffer severe environmental degradation. In many areas this has led to unsustainable trends which have impacted on economic activities and human well being. To address those problems, many efforts have been deployed for developing Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in the region.
An important progress has been made with the ratification, within the framework of the Barcelona Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and the Coastal Region of the Mediterranean, of the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Protocol for the Mediterranean Sea in January 2008. The ICZM protocol shall enter into force at the end of 2010. This Protocol offers, for the first time in the Mediterranean, an opportunity to work in a new way, and a model that can be used as a basis for solving similar problems elsewhere, such as in the Black Sea.
The IUCN Mediterranean Marine Programme is already involved in a number of pragmatic initiatives to preserve and restore the biological integrity of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as to foster the sustainable development of the region.
The PEGASO project
The project continues ICZM efforts, supporting new coastal and marine integrated approach policies through three innovative actions:
1. Create an ICZM governance platform as a bridge between scientist and end-user communities, going far beyond a conventional bridging. The building of a shared scientific and end users platform is at the heart of this proposal linked with new models of governance.
2. Refine and further develop efficient and easy-to-use tools for making sustainability assessments in the coastal zone (indicators, accounting methods and models, scenarios) to be tested and validated in a multi-scale approach for integrated regional assessment.
3. Implement a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to organize and standardize spatial data and support information sharing on an interactive visor, available to the ICZM Platform, and to disseminate the results of the project to all interested parties.
Partners
The project gathers a consortium of 25 partners in 16 Mediterranean countries, led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in Spain, and is co-financed by the European Commission within the Framework Programme 7 (FP7).
Duration and cost
The project is scheduled for 4 years, starting 01/01/2010 and ending 31/12/2013, at a total cost of nearly 7 million Euros.
Although we give the link to the project website, please note that it is still under development
For more details on this project, please contact: alain.jeudy@iucn.org
For more details on this project, please contact: alain.jeudy@iucn.org
IUCN-Med is mainly financed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment of Spain, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Environment of the Junta de Andalucía and Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
