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The Interreg Marittimo project CRESO gathered its partners in Nice on 5 June 2026 for a full-day meeting dedicated to presenting the first year of work on a cross-border approach to climate change adaptation along Mediterranean coastlines. Hosted by the Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur at the Centre Universitaire de la Méditerranée, the meeting brought together researchers, technical agencies and territorial actors to share progress on understanding coastal hazards, assessing vulnerabilities and developing common tools and protocols for action.

The day opened with remarks from Félix Gravel, Environment Director of the Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur, and Laure Verneyre, Director of Cerema Méditerranée. The University of Genoa (UNIGE), lead partner of CRESO, set the tone for the day by stressing the need to move beyond purely technical responses toward integrated solutions grounded in science, engineering and nature-based approaches. The project is structured around three Work Packages: characterising and projecting coastal hazards under climate change; identifying at-risk coastal territories through vulnerability analysis; and building a shared action plan for these territories. CRESO covers the full Interreg Marittimo area, with a particular focus on the pilot sites of Nice, Ajaccio, Cagliari, Genoa and Livorno.

MEDSEA: Turning Risk Knowledge into Operational Decisions

Among the day's presentations, our co-founder Alessio Satta presented a shared methodological framework for moving from climate risk analysis to operational decision-making,  a piece of work positioned as a forward-looking, end-of-project component aimed at putting the knowledge generated by CRESO into practice.

 

Satta's presentation started from a clear observation: the scientific data exists, and so do the tools, but the link between knowledge and decision-making remains insufficiently structured. To bridge that gap, MEDSEA proposed a five-step protocol designed to support coastal territories - including the city of Nice - in translating risk diagnostics into concrete decisions:

Understanding the risks at stake for a given territory.

Assessing the room for action, identifying both barriers and levers available to local actors.

Defining clear objectives, built through a participatory process and aligned with existing planning documents.

Selecting and prioritising adaptation measures, organised into a structured, hierarchised portfolio.

Making choices actionable, by assigning a responsible party, a timeline and a funding source to each measure.

The expected outcomes of this work are threefold. First, MEDSEA aims to produce risk scenarios fine-grained enough to guide action at the scale of a neighbourhood, a street or a single piece of infrastructure. Second, the framework seeks to build a shared decision-making pathway connecting municipalities, metropolitan authorities, regions, national government and infrastructure managers, all working from common, accessible data. Finally, the approach aims to better quantify the costs of inaction — economic losses, beach degradation, and damage to biodiversity and infrastructure — strengthening the case for adaptation and helping unlock European funding for implementation.

A Shared Picture of Coastal Risk

Contributions from partners across the consortium continued throughout the day, enriching the discussions with diverse perspectives and expertise.

 The University of Genoa presented a 45-year regional meteo-marine dataset (1979–2023) and future climate projections to 2100, feeding high-resolution flood models for pilot sites such as Nice.

ISPRA introduced an innovative cross-border geodatabase combining shoreline, beach and coastal structure data to track erosion and morphological change between 2000 and 2020. 

Cerema presented a coastal risk indicator combining physical exposure with socio-economic vulnerability, mapped across a fine 200 x 200 metre grid. 

SIGMA NL discussed methods for estimating the monetary value of less visible climate impacts on wellbeing, including the cost of inaction for ecosystems such as Posidonia seagrass meadows. 

Finally, the Corsican planning agency AUE shared a first socio-economic diagnostic of the Bay of Ajaccio, highlighting the territory's high exposure to climate hazards alongside significant social and economic vulnerabilities.

Looking Ahead

The Nice meeting marked an important first milestone for CRESO, consolidating the methods developed so far, their current limitations, and the work still ahead. With its operational, action-oriented framework, MEDSEA's contribution stands out as a bridge between CRESO's scientific outputs and the real-world decisions that coastal territories across the Mediterranean will need to make in the years ahead.

CRESO (Coastal Risk and Socio-Economic Evaluation in the face of Climate Change) is an Interreg Marittimo IT-FR Maritime project bringing together partners from France and Italy to support climate adaptation along Mediterranean coastlines. Explore the website