News & events

Last week, from 3 until 8 May, the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2026 was held in Vienna, Austria. The conference was attended by more than 20,000 geoscientists from all over the world covering all disciplines. The event aims to provide scientists and early career researchers with an opportunity to present their work and discuss ideas with other experts in the field of geoscience. 

COAST-SCAPES, which builds on the work initiated by REST-COAST, a related Horizon Europe initiative addressing today's key coastal challenges, was presented alongside its predecessor at EGU 2026. Several partnering institutions within both projects presented their work through poster presentations and co-chaired sessions. 

Among all participants, Fabienne Horneman from the CMCC Foundation (Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change) contributed a poster presentation focusing on coastal risk assessment and how nature-based solutions (NbS) can drive transformative adaptation. Nguyen Ngoc Diep from the CMCC Foundation delivered another poster presentation named “Linking hydroclimatic hazards and catchment vulnerability to river ecological status under a data-sparse condition using hybrid graph neural networks,” shedding more light on a newly implemented framework for the Veneto region that explores the relationship between climatic vulnerabilities. 

Additionally, Luciana Villa Castrillon, together with Dr. Benjamin Jacobs from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, co-chaired sessions at this year’s EGU General Assembly. During the session “Advances in Ocean Coastal Monitoring and Forecasting," Luciana delivered a presentation on the influence of seagrass restoration in the southern North Sea. Dr. Benjamin Jacobs delivered an oral presentation during the session “Evaluation of seagrass as a nature-based solution for coastal protection in the German Wadden Sea under end-of-century sea level rise projections.” Luciana, along with COAST-SCAPES’ project coordinator Dr. Manel Grifoll, was also a chairperson in the session “Oceanography at coastal scales. Modelling, coupling, observations, and applications.”

Dr. Giovanni Coppini from the CMCC Foundation, Dr. Joanna Staneva, head of the Hydrodynamics and Data Assimilation department at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, and REST-COAST’s project coordinator, Dr. Agustín Sánchez-Arcilla, co-chaired a session called “The global coastal ocean: multi-hazard early-warning system for coastal resilience," contributing directly to the UN Decade Challenge 6: Enhancing community resilience to ocean hazards. 

COAST-SCAPES’ coordination institution, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, also participated in the event, with project coordinator Manel Grifoll delivering a poster presentation on the long-term evolution of salt-wedge intrusion in the Ebro River. Two other poster presentations were delivered at the conference, focused on satellite-based analysis of shoreline evolution along wave-dominated deltas of the Catalan coast, as well as on a DIY sensor approach for morphohydrodynamic monitoring at the Ebro River mouth.