ENDURE aimed to improve adaptation capacity to climate change by focusing on 2 Seas coastal sand dunes. The project’s goal was to increase the capacity of 2 Seas stakeholders to apply ecosystem-based management approaches, decreasing reliance on hard engineering interventions. The project looked forward to draw from cross-border expertise to inform and supply new purpose-developed solutions to answer real world dune management problems occurring now under climate change. The partnership has been carefully constructed to include the national, regional and local partners to really drive through change into clear improvements in dune management across the 2 Seas area. The partnership has collaborated to capitalise on the best knowledge & expertise available across the Member States. Each partner was enthusiastic about working to improve and restore the dunes' ecosystem capacity to serve as adaptable, living sea defences for a coastline which is naturally resilient to erosion, flooding & sea level rise.

At the conception phase of the project, partners remarked that while costal dunes in the 2 Seas area face similar issues, dune management usually occurred in isolation at an ad-hoc local level & did not cross borders. The 2 Seas area has the most extensively dune-protected coast in Europe. Coastal dunes behave as a single natural system & are indifferent to political or national borders. Similarly, climate change operates on a global scale & its impacts do not stop at borders. Despite a clear need for cooperation, the stakeholders were not effectively sharing assets/ideas and transnational scientific expertise was not reaching dune managers on the ground. It appeared that a collaborative approach was crucial to combat the ongoing system of isolated working. The 2 Seas coastlines are shared and partners stressed it had to be reflected in the ways of working to secure dune adaptive capacity and ensure resilience to climate change impacts into the future.

The partnership expressed the added-value of the cross-border aspect. Although working with many diverse organisations is challenging, ENDURE has reached a greater level of achievement due to cross-border cooperation between cross-sector partners. It has also allowed ground truthing of data sets and predictions at a much larger scale than would have been possible without the project, thereby increasing the accuracy and usability/uptake of the tools developed. Additionally, the cross-border field visits allowed partners to share experience and examples from partnering regions effectively.
As to specific impacts thanks to the cross-border approach, coastal dunes in Norfolk have begun to be managed holistically with removal of silos around visitor access and management. Next, in Belgium the added value of insights gained from the tool development, both with respect to constraints, specificities of satellite images and interpretation, helped meeting expectations. Finally, in France it has enabled Cerema to prove the efficiency of sand nets through the use of observations and modelling techniques considering that before ENDURE, they hadn’t been able to gather scientific proofs of their efficiency.