Sustainable coastal zone management in Sweden - Biodiversity in theoretical and empirical perspectives

Coastal ecosystems are among the most vulnerable ones, suffering from increasing pressure through multiple resource use, pollution, and global environmental change. Maintenance of biodiversity in land and marine environments located in coastal zones requires more than protected areas and nature conservation programmes. The approaches to integrated management in many countries allow for new initiatives to combine biodiversity management with human resource use and production activities. At present a nation-wide research programme for sustainable coastal zone management is carried out in Sweden. In this programme new ways to coastal biodiversity management are discussed with the aim of integrating natural resource use and maintenance of biodiversity at the coast. Such ideas can be analysed in frameworks like ecological restoration of coastal habitats ol participatory resource management with active involvement of stakeholders and resource users. Both approaches emphasise the human and social components of biodiversity management - in contrast to traditional conservation which is oriented to the biophysical basis and legal regulation through a protection status (a status given to nearly 400,000 ha of land and water along the more than 7000 km of the Swedish coastline). The Swedish research programme has a human ecology component in theoretical and in empirical research aiming at managerial knowledge for natural resource management.