Coastwatch History

Coastwatch Eye

COASTWATCH EUROPE Common Aims and History

Coastwatch Europe is an international network of environmental groups, universities and other educational establishments, who in turn work with local groups and individuals around the coast of Europe.

Common aims are:

Protection and sustainable use of our coastal resources;
Informed public participation in environmental planning and management, including Coastal Zone Management (CZM)

The coordination teams in individual countries give information, education, training on waste management, CZM and habitat protection for both general public and specific user/regulatory groups.

Coastwatch Europe was born in 1989 to undertake the first international Coastwatch Europe survey. Two years previously the survey had been designed and tried in Ireland by collaboration of the Irish Times (Frank Mac Donald) and Karin Dubsky. The survey is akin to a basic eco-audit of the shore carried out with the coastal public, schools and specific interest groups. Results for each site in each country are then fed back to the international coordination in Ireland and analysed.. The autumn 1998 international results overview has just been published, as part of a 10 year celebration conference in Dublin Castle.

Where funds allow, surveyors are equipped with test kits to also check the quality of small inflows (pipes, streams, drains) discharging directly into coastal waters. That includes phosphate and nitrate tests. In autumn 1997 and 1998 Coastwatch surveyors in Ireland North and South checked phosphate levels in several hundred inflow. Results confirm EPA reports of widespread phosphate pollution. (Dubsky et al 1998).The situation appears to have drastically worsened since the early 1990s when the last Coastwatch Phophate tests were made.

The Coastwatch Europe International Coordinator - Karin Dubsky BA MSc is an Environmental Scientist, who has worked on CZM and on waste issues as consultant, as university lecturer and as environmental group representative in a number of countries of both Europe and US. She is currently on the Comhar sustainable development forum set up by the Minister of the Environment in 1998 and a member of staff in Trinity College Dublin, Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty.