Developing participatory coastal management: Barcelona's experience with the European ENFORCE project

Barcelona’s contribution into the European ENFORCE project, which promotes participatory coastal management by integrating citizen-generated data into environmental monitoring and compliance. ENFORCE advances a pan-European collaboration model and introduces a data readiness level to assess the suitability of community-sourced information, supported by geospatial intelligence and AI. The Barcelona Living Lab pilot focuses on marine biodiversity, cigarette butts and wet wipes, combining citizen science, image-based data collection and multi-stakeholder working groups to improve regulatory alignment on coastal issues. The work highlights tools, methods and governance processes that support sustainable management and informed policymaking across European coastal regions.