Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, scientific literature has emphasized coastal social–ecological systems’ (SES) ability to adapt. In some geographic regions, SESs still depict high resilience, but in most of them, there is a growing undesirable vulnerability of coastal human communities to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. There is a lot to document, and evaluate, as to the diversity of local and regional solutions to prevent more coastal ecosystem losses or restore lost ecosystems and the result of increasing and changing pressure on sea and land use. Many countries have different kinds of marine and coastal protected areas and other strategies to preserve or manage coastal ecosystems, but these regional planning efforts in many countries remain unknown to individuals in coastal zones. This Special Issue offers the opportunity to present collaborative research and examine co-designed local solutions, co-management plans, co-designed policies, or co-generated knowledge as approaches to reach more sustainable coastal SES. Therefore, we invite coordinated “top–down” and “bottom–up” successful strategies to provide lessons learned and hope to coastal citizens and regional and local governments. This Special Issue welcomes papers evaluating all kinds of marine and coastal planning instruments and contrasts their conservation or management results with the contextual circumstances where these areas are embedded. A discussion is welcome on the shocks, stressors, thresholds, and trajectories of coastal social–ecological systems in temperate, arid–semiarid, and tropical coastal areas. We want to show the creativity of academia and communities to build more sustainable coastal zones.

Our aim is to emphasize the importance of land use change as an anthropogenic stressor and land planning to encourage the sustainable management of the coastal social–ecological systems integrated by ecosystems such as freshwater wetlands, mangroves, dunes, beaches, and reefs. More specifically, this issue is aimed at integral studies that show the importance of the interaction between societal elements and coastal ecosystem service management, and its relationship with land use change. More importantly, the results of manuscripts should offer specific proposals with alternatives regarding solving coastal territorial planning problems caused by public policies and/or climate change.

The purpose of this issue is to integrate conceptual–theoretical and study case manuscripts that offer new insights in relation to land use and planning and coastal social-ecological systems. Therefore, manuscripts should be focused but not limited to the following lines of research:

• Ecosystem service assessment and monetary valuation, and tradeoff between land use change and coastal ecosystem conservation in the context of sustainable management;
• Resilience and vulnerability assessment and its relationship with coastal ecosystem service management and land use change (resilience-related concepts such as connectivity, polycentric governance systems, diversity and redundancy, adaptive complex systems, encourage learning, broader participation, slow variables and feedbacks);
• Relationship between potential effects of climate variability on coastal ecosystems and the sustainability of social–ecological systems;
• Co-generation of knowledge, co-design of coastal policies or successful coastal co-management plans.

Most literature lacks emphasis on the process of regional planning. Therefore, especially welcome are papers documenting the lessons learned from small localities, different sizes or shapes of marine and coastal protected areas, coastal cities and small towns, and coastal planning policies experiences from temperate, semiarid–arid, and tropical climates. Additionally, welcome are the methods or processes of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, the opportunities that this kind of research offers to local or regional plans, and the ingenuity that team-working provides.

Dr. Ileana Espejel
Guest Editor

Dr. César Vázquez-González
Dr. Alejandro Espinoza Tenorio
Dr. Georges Seingier
Co-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.

• community coastal planning
• ecosystem-based management
• ingenuity and innovation
• resilience
• worldwide coastal ecosystems