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What? Since the early nineties of last century, coastal managers responsible for coastal defence and management in five North Sea countries have come together in the North Sea Coastal Managers Group (NSCMG). These policy makers and managers meet annually for the purpose of exchanging information and deciding on forms of cooperation. As a result, two projects, Comrisk (2001-2005) and its successor Safecoast have emerged from this network, supported by the European Union.  NSCMG (2001)
Project Safecoast is funded by national and regional governments of five North Sea countries and is co-financed by the European Union’s Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in the framework of the Interreg 3b North Sea Programme for transnational projects. Project Safecoast’s total budget has been about € 2,3 million for the period between July 2005 and July 2008. Project Safecoast was led by the Dutch National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management / Rijkswaterstaat RIKZ that was in October 2007 re-organised and partly converged into Rijkswaterstaat - Centre for Water Management. The international Safecoast partners are listed here. Why? Knowledge on how to manage flood risk is widespread and fragmented across the North Sea region. Different countries focus on different aspects of policies and strategies in order to reduce the risk of flooding to people, property and the natural environment. It has proved important for the process of knowledge and information exchange to cooperate, discuss and work together on jointly faced challenges and management questions.  Hamburg flood (Germany, 1962) Dike breach (Netherlands, 1953) In 2005, the NSCMG initiated project Safecoast, with the aim to further learn from each other about coastal risk management in the face of new challenges. Safecoast set out to answer the question: ‘How to manage our North Sea coasts in 2050?’ and focused on scenarios of future change and risk management with respect to coastal flooding and erosion. Earlier findings of project Comrisk have been taken further into the context of future risks and challenges to inform science, management and policy. The issue of global climate change and associated sea level rise has generally given rise to a societal concern, especially in coastal flood prone areas.
However, the translation of the climate change threat to national, regional or local action is obstructed by issues of downscaling. Safecoast can be seen as an attempt to partly compensate for this mismatch of scales by keeping a North Sea perspective and connecting science with policy on different scales.
Project Safecoast also aims to give examples of strategy development for specific situations and gives messages, conclusions and recommendations regarding further steps in the North Sea region cooperation towards the ongoing development of coastal risk management strategies. Project Safecoast is based on studies (either comparative, strategic or more technical) and knowledge exchange and does not aim to engage in any political process. Additionally, Safecoast emphasises the need for enhancing public awareness to the topic of climate change in relation to coastal risk management. Also, the implementation process of the EU Floods Directive that is based on the river basin approach benefit from having an overview of the coastal system-specifics of flooding and erosion from the sea. How? The Safecoast project was divided into work packages called ‘Actions’. Depending on their goals these actions could either compare between countries (cohesion actions), translating knowledge into pilot site risk assessments or plans (focused actions) and finally converging the knowledge and lessons learnt into a synthesis (synthesis action). Results have been discussed in 5 seperate workshops, that have contributed to a better and common understanding of our methods, our ways of thinking and our cultures.
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