Carrero, R., Navas, F., Malvárez, G., and Cáceres, F., 2013. Participative Future Scenarios for Integrated Coastal Zone Management.

Coastal zones are rapidly changing all around the world due to strong human pressures such as urban sprawl, agriculture intensification, infrastructure expansion and industrial growth. In addition, climate change might become an important factor in the years to come, and its associated effects might affect coastal areas. To cope with this situation the need to adopt an Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) approach has been internationally recognised during the last decades. Nonetheless to be able to plan and manage coastal areas in the long-term while facing all the challenges that lie ahead, it is necessary to develop new tools that not only put into practice the ICZM principles but also incorporate and deal with the uncertainties that surround the future. In this paper, we present Participative Future Scenarios (PFS) as a tool to support decision-making in coastal areas under the ICZM principles. PFS allow exploring how coastal areas could develop in the future, using an integrative approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, taking into consideration coastal hazards and climate change, as well as human interaction, as the process is based on participatory techniques involving local stakeholders. The process carried out to implement PFS at the local scale has been pilot-tested in the Andalusian coastal municipality of Ayamonte, South Western Spain. Four well-differentiated scenarios showing alternative and plausible futures for the study site for the year 2050 were obtained. The result of this pioneer exercise points out that PFS are a powerful and ground-breaking tool for ICZM with a double potential: i) The generation of PFS is a valuable exercise per se as it provides an opportunity to promote participation, understand public's different opinions, facilitate communication between stakeholders and increase public awareness about coastal future problems (e.g. coastal hazards). ii) PFS can be-and should be- used as part of the decision making process for coastal planning, allowing policies to be designed in a more robust manner, accounting for critical uncertainties -as diverse as economic fluctuations or climate change- and helping to select the path to the most desirable future. Additionally, the PFS process proposed in this paper is a transferable technique that can be easily replicated in other coastal areas.