OCEANIDS – Climate-Informed Tools for a Resilient Inclusive Blue Economy

The OCEANIDS initiative is a European coastal resilience platform designed to empower port authorities, municipal planners, and regional agencies with actionable insights for operational decision-making and long-term climate adaptation. Across Europe, coastal communities are increasingly exposed to coastal erosion, sea-level rise, extreme weather, and land subsidence, creating growing pressure on infrastructure and planning systems. The project integrates Earth observation, in situ monitoring, and AI-driven analytics into a unified, user-centred system.

At the core of this system is the OCEANIDS Platform, which consists of two main components that together provide a comprehensive response to coastal resilience needs:

One of the project's key achievements is the deployment of Coastal Data Services across 20 pilot sites through the EO-P. These services deliver high-resolution datasets on atmospheric conditions, shoreline dynamics, vertical land motion, sea-level trends, and wave climate. These harmonised data streams address previous gaps from fragmented monitoring, enabling stakeholders to make informed, evidence-based decisions at local, regional, and national scales.

Complementing these services, the OCEANIDS Decision Support Platform (O-DSP) forms the second critical component of the platform, synthesising hazard forecasts, vulnerability indicators, and costed mitigation options into an intuitive workflow. It enables users to identify risk hotspots, assess vulnerabilities, compare adaptation options and prioritise interventions based on both effectiveness and cost. Users can identify daily risk hotspots, evaluate interventions, and prioritise measures with clarity and transparency, improving both short-term operational planning and long-term adaptation strategies.

Further enhancing the Platform, the OCEANWISE AI Chatbot allows natural-language queries on the Impacts Database, providing calculations, sourced summaries, and rapid scenario exploration without requiring specialised technical expertise.

In parallel, OCEANIDS places end users at the centre of its approach. Through the Ephemeral Social Network, CityWaves, the project strengthens participatory engagement by enabling dialogue, feedback, and collaborative interaction among stakeholders, thus supporting more inclusive and responsive coastal governance.

OCEANIDS is now moving toward wider end-user validation and broader deployment. With core services operational, the decision support system (DSS) in active use, and stakeholder confidence growing, the project establishes a scalable framework for anticipatory, coordinated, and climate-informed coastal governance across Europe.

Coastal cities and ports navigate a complex decision-making landscape shaped by rapid urbanisation, expanding economic activity, and intensifying climate-related risks. Authorities must balance economic development with environmental protection and long-term resilience, often under conditions of uncertainty and fragmented information. Stakeholders, including port authorities, municipal planners, environmental agencies, and local communities, must balance economic growth with long-term environmental stewardship. Yet, this process is hindered by fragmented information, diverse data sources, and the growing urgency to act on hazards such as coastal erosion, sea-level rise, land subsidence, flash floods, and other geohazards that increasingly affect daily operations and strategic planning.

Within this context, the OCEANIDS initiative was designed to support evidence-based, coordinated decision-making. Partners across academia, industry, and research organisations recognised that effective management requires timely, high-resolution, and trustworthy insights on coastal dynamics, information that traditional monitoring approaches struggle to deliver consistently. Although satellite EO, machine learning, and AI-enabled analytics offer transformative potential, decision-makers still face challenges integrating these inputs with ground-based observations and operational knowledge.

By developing interoperable tools and harmonised data workflows, OCEANIDS seeks to give stakeholders clear, actionable intelligence on environmental conditions, emerging risks and actionable recommendations to enhance preparedness. This ensures that planning for coastal resilience, port operations, and sustainable urban development is grounded in accurate situational awareness, enabling informed and proactive decisions across diverse European coastal regions.

Coastal Data Services in EO-P: The OCEANIDS Coastal Data services deliver continuous, high-resolution information on coastal change, wave climate, sea-level rise, vertical land movement, and atmospheric conditions, including seasonal forecasts and RCP-based climate projection impacts on weather and wave dynamics. All data products are accessible directly through the platform across 20 European pilot sites, covering locations within the jurisdiction of every end-user community involved in the project, ensuring that each group can benefit from site-specific, decision-relevant insights. This approach can in the future be extended to other regions, ensuring needs are met for users in different climate zones. Some examples of the datasets to be explored by end users can be found in figure 1-5.

OCEANIDS Decision Support Platform (O-DSP): The OCEANIDS Decision Support Platform integrates climate hazard and risk assessment with decision support in a single environment. It provides pre-event short-term, pre-event long-term, and post-event risk assessments by combining different types of datasets, such as hazard, asset, and fragility data, with dedicated risk analysis algorithms. Through the platform, users can select a pilot site and hazard scenario, identify risk hotspots, and explore targeted recommendations for risk mitigation, such as temporary flood barriers or changes to port operations. Each recommended measure is accompanied by an effectiveness rating (1-5) and an estimated implementation cost, allowing users to compare options and prioritize the measures that deliver the greatest benefit within a given budget.

OCEANWISE AI Chatbot: A multilingual assistant that answers natural-language questions, retrieves evidence from the Impacts Database, performs calculations, and provides sourced, ready-to-use summaries.

The OCEANIDS Coastal Data Services integrate a suite of atmospheric, oceanographic, and land-based datasets derived from satellite Earth observation, climate modelling, and in situ measurements to support coastal monitoring, risk assessment, and climate adaptation planning.

The OCEANIDS Climate Change-Hazard and Risk-Decision-Support System provides pre-event short-term, pre-event long-term and post-event risk assessments which accommodates different types of datasets (e.g., hazard, assets, fragilities) and risk analysis algorithms.

OCEANIDS demonstrates how integrated environmental intelligence can reduce uncertainty and support more proactive decision-making in coastal areas. Across the Mediterranean, Boreal, and Atlantic pilot regions, the platform provides earlier signals of emerging risks, helping authorities act sooner to protect port operations, safeguard coastal communities, and strengthen climate-adaptation planning. For end users such as the Region of Crete, the Port of Helsinki, the City of Málaga, the Regional Council of Southwest Finland, and the Governo dos Açores, this has translated into clearer situational awareness and more confident, evidence-based planning decisions which enables improved coordination among agencies responsible for safety, transport, and the environment. Consistent access to harmonised, decision-ready analytics is helping shift coastal risk management from reactive to anticipatory, supporting workers, residents, and local economies that depend on resilient coastal infrastructure.

The introduction of the OCEANIDS Decision Support Platform (O-DSP) further strengthened this impact by enabling users to evaluate vulnerabilities and mitigation pathways using a transparent, structured approach (fig. 6, fig. 7). By presenting risk timelines, vulnerability ratings, and costed recommendations in an integrated view, the DSS helped authorities prioritise protective measures and justify resource allocation, particularly valuable for ports facing tight operational windows or regions exposed to several different hazards. Early feedback from pilot sites indicates that the DSS supported clearer communication between technical teams and decision-makers which accelerated the translation of complex environmental data into actionable planning options.

In Málaga, access to integrated shoreline, wave, and subsidence information, combined with the DSS workflow, provided municipal and port authorities with a stronger basis for evaluating coastal resilience needs. Historical erosion trends and vertical land movement indicators helped confirm which sections of the waterfront were most vulnerable to future extreme events, while forecast-linked vulnerability assessments allowed port operators to adapt mooring strategies during high-risk wind or wave conditions (fig. 8). These insights not only supported day-to-day operational readiness but also fed into longer-term discussions on land-use planning, infrastructure prioritisation, and alignment with climate-resilience objectives under national and EU frameworks. As in other regions, the beneficiaries extended beyond institutions to the broader community, through improved safety, reduced disruption to economic activity, and enhanced preparedness for climate-related hazards.