Australia is an urbanised and a coastal nation with over 80 per cent of its population living within 50 km of the coast. Our coastal urban environments provide economic wealth and are the location for most of our transport, commercial, residential and defence infrastructure. They also fulfil important cultural, recreational and aesthetic needs, have intrinsic biological diversity values and provide essential ecosystem functions such as primary productivity, nutrient cycling and water filtration.
Australia is in a period of pronounced economic development with a focus on resource extraction and infrastructure development, much of it centred on coastal hubs. The great challenge for coastal managers and policy makers is to balance multiple competing uses, and the impacts of those uses.
Ten key science challenges are identified. Strategic coastal research, both applied and basic, is essential to underpin the repair and ongoing management of these high value ecosystems for improved productivity and enhanced cultural and conservation values.
To address coastal stakeholder needs requires the marine science community to draw upon the breadth of its disciplinary and institutional capabilities to meet the following ten overarching challenges:
- Better characterise coastal habitats, environment processes and define envelopes of natural variability.
- Understand catchment contaminant pathways and define thresholds of concern.
- Address cumulative impacts and identify important stressor interactions.
- Develop bio-observing technologies.
- Understanding connectivity and resource use. Understanding the impacts of the continual degradation and loss of coastal and estuarine habitats, including consideration of the loss of productivity and ecosystem services, is required.
- Incorporate quantitative and qualitative social and cultural perspectives into coastal decision-making:
- Develop, test and apply eco-engineering approaches.
- Develop methods to mitigate coastal hazards.
- Improve data coordination and discoverability.
- Support the development of urban/coastal industries.
Specific science priorities for urban and coastal environments for the next 5, 10 and 20 years are identified in sub-theme papers on contaminants (Apte et al., 2014), biosecurity and non-indigenous species (Piola et al., 2014), climate impacts (Bishop et al., 2014), recreational fishing (Griffiths et al., 2014), indigenous research (Bayliss et al., 2014) and green engineering of coastal infrastructure (Dafforn et al., 2014).
The Urban Coastal Environments White paper details mechanisms for meeting our great challenges. These include requirements for infrastructure, facilities, training, funding, coordination, information access and knowledge transfer. Some of the needs of urban coastal research are similar to those that emerge under other NMSP themes and we encourage a process whereby complementary and synergistic demands are identified across themes. Following this we believe it will be easier to identify unique demands that require a distinct program of prioritisation and realisation.