Brussels, 25 September 2025 – The All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA) today launched the All-Atlantic Network of Coastal Resilience Beacon Sites, a new initiative linking coastal communities across the Atlantic to test and demonstrate practical, science-based approaches to coastal resilience.
The Beacon Sites Network is designed to serve as a reference point for policymakers, communities and researchers for good practices about on-the-ground measures to tackle coastal risks such as sea-level rise, erosion, and biodiversity decline. Each Beacon Site contributes by documenting in their local community what works in practice – from nature-based solutions, governance arrangements to technical interventions – and the Network makes the results comparable and transferable around the Atlantic and beyond.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects, with high confidence, that “coastal communities face challenging choices in crafting context-specific and integrated responses to sea level rise that balance costs, benefits and trade-offs of available options and that can be adjusted over time […] All types of options, including protection, accommodation, ecosystem-based adaptation, coastal advance and retreat, wherever possible, can play important roles in such integrated responses“. The Beacon Sites Network is an AAORIA initiative designed to respond to this need by fostering systematic knowledge exchange between scientists and communities, providing evidence-based guidance for scaling up resilience strategies, and strengthening science–policy–society interfaces.
The All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA) is an ocean science diplomacy initiative uniting countries from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in contributing to the science needed to support ocean policy, governance and management on domestic, regional and international scales in the Atlantic region. The Beacon Sites Network has been enabled by the OKEANO project funded by the Horizon Europe to support AAORIA.
