It's official now: We do PEGASO!

A large PEGASO society is being built-up since the lunching of the project in February this year: project partners, end-users from the Mediterranean region, members of the Black Sea Strategic Panel and representatives of pilot projects (CASES) that all constitute a Shared Platform for ICZM Governance, which is at the very core of the project. They met for the first time at the Project Kick-off Meeting held in Venice, on 12-14 April 2010, to discuss the project activities and define the path to follow in the years to come. The old Venetian theatre "Auditorium Santa Margherita“ where the meeting took place was the perfect scene for this first act in which PEGASO actors had the opportunity to know each others and introduce themselves to a large audience.

The project seeks to improve the coastal zone management by bridging the science and coastal governance at regional, national and local level in the Mediterranean and Black Sea Regions. Its ultimate objective is to involve a large variety of stakeholders who will work on integration, always with one shared objective in mind – better future for our coasts and seas. In that, access to data and information are essential so that PEGASO will at the same time seek to produce updated coastal data and to provide tools for their transfer towards stakeholders whose feed-back will in turn help refining the scientific research. Data management, scientific research, active stakeholder participation, interactive methods and tools, pilot applications – these will be the main ingredients of the project.

The PEGASO project comes to support the future implementation of the Mediterranean Protocol. The Black Sea riparian countries are actually considering the possibility to prepare a similar regional tool, which can in fact be largely inspired by the Mediterranean one as the two regions share similar coastal concerns.

Therefore, one of the first tasks within the project will be a stock-take of policy, institutional, legal and financial frameworks for ICZM in the countries of the two regions. This stock-take will be mainly made using a questionnaire to be agreed upon with the NFPs of the Barcelona and Bucharest Conventions, who will be officially informed on and involved in the project during a meeting to be organised in connection with the "Coast Day“ celebration in Slovenia in September this year.