At the very end of January we organized and delivered the 3rd meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coastal and Marine Issues. It was a great success, with more than 30 attendees and 5 speakers providing opinion and insight for UK Members of Parliament.
Another event we are organising is the CoastNet/Corepoint conference “A Very Visible Truth – Climate Change at the Coast”, for which we are recruiting interesting and diverse speakers. We’ve been working with the Coastal Partnerships Working Group and DEFRA to organize and deliver the 5th Annual UK Coastal Partnership Forum.
Attendance to EU funded project meetings like Corepoint in Cardiff (Wales) and Aberdeen (Scotland) or ENCORA in Thesalonicca (Greece) has kept us on the move. In the meantime we’ve been developing technical activities like our Coastal Library and Coastal Ontology or Knowledge Base in collaboration with ECS from Southampton University and Peter Kingsley, an expert in editorial management. We have started an Action Research Evaluation of the ENCORA portal, and resources such as the Coastal Wiki.
Some advisory work has been developed for the East of England Regional Assembly Maritime Task Force, to advise on their response to the UK consultation on the EU Maritime Policy Green Paper. We have also been commissioned to develop a scoping study to gather information about current coastal activity and gain understanding of the national ICZM programme and implications for East of England.
We’ll be presenting our new resource for Marine Educators, a booklet called “Dive Straight In” in which CoastNet’s team brought together good practices from workshops with practitioners around the UK. This will be in a workshop in Exeter organized by the Finding Sanctuary partnership project at the end of March.
As well as this we’ve been staff searching to increase our dynamic team, networking, helping out members and improving our quality management systems… Phew…it’s been tiring just writing all this!!!
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