- Goods and services provided by coastal regions

So, it is important to be aware that the coast is where more and more people are living, and is the basic resource upon which the tourist trade is built, an essential element of the economic activity of the Balearic Islands. But coastal areas provide a whole series of goods and services that we can now quantify in economic terms (where possible, something which is not always the case, as shown by the school of ‘hard sustainability’). Goods include, for example, food, salt, minerals and crude oil, sand, biodiversity (including genetic wealth of medicinal and biotechnological interest), and so on. Services provided by coastal ecosystems are perhaps less quantifiable in absolute terms since, in many cases, they have no price in society and life on Earth, although their worth is clear, sometimes even quantifiable from an economic point of view. These are, for example, the stabilisation of beaches (protecting them from extreme weather and wave and wind erosion), the maintenance of biodiversity, the maintenance of water quality (through filtration and breaking down pollutants) and services associated with tourism and leisure activities. For many years we have taken these goods and services as given, but today we know that this is not the case. We can group these goods and services into several thematic categories: biodiversity, water quality, stabilising the coast, tourism and leisure, food production and fisheries. It is also important to bear in mind the functions of coastal areas relative to the water cycle, climate and global change (climate change is one of many changes affecting ecosystems and the goods and services they provide us with) as well as services associated with land and sea transport (including ports) and energy and water (including infrastructures). s).

- Demands, conflicts and assessment of alternatives in a coastal context.

Starting from the current state of the coast, knowing about its historical evolution as well as pressure withstood and goods and services produced, conflicts are sketched deriving from various expectations (which are legitimate a priori) from various sectors and possible answers to these are explored. It is vital to assess in detail the various alternative action that can be proposed for a specific coastal area, always in a global and real framework of sustainability. Nevertheless, to be able to include this type of assessment of alternatives in decision-making processes we must be able to have better data and a better understanding of how coastal ecosystems function and (both natural and anthropogenic) variability within them.

- Quality directed research with a predictive capacity.

Quality directed research with a predictive capacity. There is, then, a clear need to support international quality research allowing us, through new and reliable data, to carry out a diagnosis of the state of the coastal system and the pressures on it, as well as moving forwards in identifying possible answers to the current and future problems that have already been identified. This is possible thanks to new integrated and interdisciplinary approaches (as opposed to historical reactive and restricted approaches), the definition of new concepts and new goals together with specific actions whose effects we can now know in almost real time through new data and multidisciplinary progress indicators for which we need to establish both the natural range of variability and the points at which alarm signals should activate. All of this has the ultimate aim to further knowledge and improve our predictive ability in terms of coastal phenomena, and design new tools to support decision making in areas such as the preservation of biodiversity, water quality, safety in bathing areas, the effects of climate change on the coast, beach erosion, the prevention of coastal damage due to natural or man-made disasters, fluctuations in ports and bays, and so on.

There are clear and established examples of these new approaches of quality research directed at answering the needs of society. Operational oceanography is one of these examples, since it comprises new sampling systems (in situ and remote), coupled with new numerical tools for predicting the evolution of marine currents. Thus there has been a move from empirical and descriptive oceanography to a predictive oceanography. The same approach is now spreading to other disciplines such as ecology, which on the whole until now had been based on empirical relationships in a very complex system, which sometimes leads to an excessive simplification of spatial and temporal variability of the environment as well as the realisation of extrapolations which may be dangerous. This new predictive and operational form of approaching the study of marine and coastal systems implies in the same breath a new perspective of adaptation of existing sampling systems to new European directives since we can go from the existence of very costly networks of sampling ‘per se’ to sampling networks necessary to validate new tools for the prediction of coastal ecosystems. In this manner, based on new predictive and operational coastal research, we can predict environmental impact, predict relationships between variables and explore and propose new strategies of coastal management. The Balearic Islands and IMEDEA are at the international vanguard of this new predictive and operational form of approaching marine and coastal research, which is multidisciplinary research into coastal ecosystems in the 21st century.