摘要：This Special Feature of Ecology and Society brings togetherimportant outcomes of the EU-funded project: Science-PolicyIntegration for Coastal System Assessment, SPICOSA. Thetitle of the project revealed its innovative nature from the start.The premise was to bind scientific information to policydecisions and to consider the coastal zone as an integratedecological-social-economic system. As a result, the SPICOSAproject was very broad, ambitious, and requiredmultidisciplinary teams of researchers to work together:natural scientists such as oceanographers and ecologists, socialscientists, economists, and modelers. In itself, this was a tourde force. In addition, the project required a participatory rolefrom stakeholders or actors, e.g., institutions, NGOs,economic sectors, etc., as well as from coastal managers anddecision makers. SPICOSA is relevant to several facets ofenvironmental policy such as the Water Framework Directive,the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the HabitatDirective, and NATURA2000, as well as the ICZM-IntegratedCoastal Zone Management recommendation. The primaryobjective of the project was to develop a practical applicationof the Systems Approach Framework (SAF), which representsan important step forward to enable the appropriateimplementation of these policies. The SAF was applied at 18study sites, representing a wide variety of European coastalsystems, including transitional waters such as lagoons, deltas,and estuaries, along the coasts of the European regional seas,from the shores of the Black Sea to the fjords of Norway. TheSAF addresses the general problem of assessing complexsystems for conversion to sustainable development andthereby makes a valuable contribution to sustainabilityscience. This contribution is not just at an academic level,because it has been demonstrated to be fully operational forEuropean coastal systems, despite the wide range ofgovernance that these systems encompass. Although theSPICOSA sites are European, the widespread applicability ofthe SAF makes it relevant at the global scale. As such,SPICOSA was recognized by Land-Ocean Interactions in theCoastal Zone as one of the truly integrative projects joiningsocial and ecological aspects of coastal systems and with theSAF representing a major advance in the use of the systemapproach in coastal zones
