Stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognised as imperative for developing effective climate change adaptation policy within the EU, particularly for delivering sustainable coastal infrastructure. This perspective discusses how current transdisciplinary research (TDR) approaches concerning ecoengineering solutions for artificial coastal structures are insufficient in ensuring adequate stakeholder engagement to facilitate coherent and enduring decision-making and policy development processes. Socio-cultural analysis focussing on how people view and feel about artificial coastal infrastructure within coastal infrastructure research has been recognised as a large knowledge gap. We suggest that citizen science (CS) methodologies as part of a cultural ecosystem services (CES) research approach can adequately inform and support the implementation of ecoengineering solutions for hard artificial coastal structures whilst addressing existing barriers associated with stakeholder engagement in current TDR approaches.
The Single-Use Plastics Directive (EU) 72/2019/904 is the main legislation governing plastic pollution, inclusive of marine plastic pollution in the European Union (EU). The Directive has issued market restrictions on several single-use plastic products which contribute to marine plastic pollution, including foamed polystyrene products made of expanded polystyrene (EPS). However, extruded polystyrene (XPS) which is commonly used in the same single-use plastics products as EPS has been omitted from the market placement restrictions within the scope of the Directive. This has subsequently compromised the Single-Use Plastics Directive’s effectiveness for reducing marine plastic pollution and hinders the efforts of related EU instruments such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Descriptor 10 toward achieving Good Environmental Status across the marine environment in the EU. This paper provides some background on EPS and XPS, and discusses plastic pollution policy making in the EU, while further addressing the role of quantitative data in the European Joint Research Centre’s Technical Report on Top Marine Beach Litter Items in the EU for the formulation of policy regulating foamed polystyrene derived marine plastic pollution. We also provide an overview of how the communication gaps in the polymer science nomenclature for polystyrene may have contributed to the development of misnomers for extruded and EPS, consequently compromising necessary data gathering efforts. Our perspective hopes to incite conversations on communication gaps between scientists and policy makers and emphasise the need for gathering quantitative disaggregated data on the foamed polystyrene market to inform European plastic pollution legislation adequately.
This paper reviews the evolution of marine governance in Ireland in response to EU policy requirements in relation to the development of a sustainable blue economy in coherence with the United Nations Ocean Decade (2021-2030). In response to these EU requirements, Ireland has introduced the National Marine Planning Framework (NMPF) and Maritime Area Planning Act, 2021 (MAPA) in 2021 to deliver this sustainable blue economy. This new marine and coastal governance framework in Ireland reforms the consenting regime for key blue economy sectors such as Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) and sets new policy requirements for the integration of aquaculture within the MSP framework. However, the exclusion of aquaculture from the new consenting regime may hinder the full integration of the sector into MSP and impede compliance with environmental goals established by EU Directives (e.g., WFD, MSFD, MSPD). This review identifies policy and legal gaps which may impede the integration of aquaculture into the new Irish marine governance and national MSP process. Furthermore, this paper analyses aquaculture licensing cases to assess the integration of environmental criteria into planning decisions to gather insight into the readiness of the sector’s transition towards a sustainable model. The analysis from this paper indicates that the legal framework underpinning MSP in Ireland may have a limited impact on the integration of aquaculture and hinder the delivery of sustainability across all marine sectors.
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