Better Blue

Climate change poses significant challenges to sustainable development in coastal and maritime regions, which are typically characterised by their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and their dependence on natural resources for economic development.

It challenges also current governance structures, including actors ‘responsibilities for dealing with climate variability and extremes. The need for distributed risk governance and citizen and stakeholders’ engagement is increasingly recognised, however, there is still an unanswered need across EU regions for more intensive, structured, and effective interactions between citizens, local stakeholders and municipalities to plan together climate risk management and adaptation.

Open collaborative governance for climate change can help build trust among stakeholders, promote the exchange of knowledge and expertise, and foster the development of innovative solutions to complex climate challenges. By engaging a broad range of stakeholders in the governance process, this approach can also help to ensure that policies and initiatives are more effective, equitable, and sustainable over the long term.

Better Blue project aims addressing the challenges of climate change and sustainable development in EU coastal, maritime regions and islands through a holistic and bottom-up approach, the open collaborative governance model, that balances economic development with environmental conservation and social equity.This will ensure the long-term resilience and well-being of participating coastal-maritime communities and ecosystems and give example to other EU regions.

Better Blue focuses on designing sound and cogent place-based and community-agreed responses to the climate change. It gathers and blends expertise and ambitions from 9 non-metropolitan EU regions by the sea with different level of achievements in the sustainable development but focused on the same aim of becoming the models of the better blue future of Europe.