Planning for a Sustainable Marine Future

Dear Colleagues,

Coastal and marine ecosystems provide numerous ecosystem goods and services which support human well-being but are also at risk from unsustainable terrestrial and marine human activities, exacerbated by climate change. To adapt to climate change, nations and communities must design and implement solutions that are equitable, inclusive, and place based. Nature-based solutions, including ecosystem-based adaptation, green and blue infrastructure, and/or ecological engineering, are promising approaches to mitigate, adapt, and boost resilience to climate change. However, designing and implementing solutions that align natural and engineering processes to foster equitable social, environmental, and economic benefits is also an ambitious transdisciplinary task for the scientific community worldwide.

This Special Issue collates contributions on innovative research focused on advancing science and developing or applying tools to inform the design, development, and implementation of nature-based solutions aimed at supporting coastal and marine ecosystem services and people’s wellbeing worldwide. Emphasis is given to papers that define, test, and scale up solutions in integrated land–sea, coastal, and marine spatial planning and have clear potential to support human wellbeing at different scales. We encourage submissions that identify barriers and opportunities to solutioning our environmental challenges, pave ways forward to transform our approaches to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and provide useful tools to support this process.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The design, piloting, and implementation of nature-based solutions at multiple scales;
• Land–sea integrated or coastal and marine spatial planning;
• Solutions that tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, and food security;
• Application and advancement of methods for stakeholder-driven research and planning tools;
• Development of methods to conduct inclusive and equitable decision science;
• Assessment of blue economies and investment opportunities to support evidence-based policy making;
• Informing public and private investment in climate adaptation.

We are looking forward to learning about your research for the sake of restoring ocean health, fostering human well-being, and supporting economies.

Dr. Jade Delevaux
Dr. Kostantinos A. Stamoulis
Dr. Lida Teneva
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• nature-based solutions
• spatial planning
• modeling
• decision
• science
• valuation
• economy
• climate
• adaptation
• food security
• biodiversity
• land–sea planning
• marine ecosystem services
• social equity
• climate mitigation and adaptation policy
• decision support tools