The Shoreline between Nature and Society, a Changing Heritage - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 219

challenges for almost all the States, in particular for France where the
principles of the framework-directive was added to the code for
the environment. At the national level, although the steering is in the
hands of the Ministry for Ecology and Sustainable Development (and
for the sea), it is IFREMER and the Agency of Protected Marine
Areas which are in charge of coordinating the work to be carried out.
This is likely to spark debates about boundaries between organisms.
The measurement program is under time constraints: the initial
evaluation of the ecological state should have been ready by July 15,
2012, the monitoring program is expected on July 15, 2014 so that in
2018, a first assessment of the measures taken can be produced. These
ambitions will be judged as excessive.
5.5. Conclusion
The coastline is a changing heritage. The coastline is both land and
coastal sea: a situation of interface, reciprocal enrichment, reciprocal
fertilization, which unsurprisingly attracts humans and does so
increasingly in the context of globalization. Globalization travels on
the oceans, uses them as maritime routes and exploits them for its fish
stocks but also increasingly for its energy. The “heritagization” is first
and foremost the acknowledgment of a principle, i.e. that development
can only be sustainable as long as the resources of our planet are
managed in a sensible way. In order to achieve this, it was necessary
to slow down the growing occupation of the coastline, by
distinguishing the most fragile and important environments for future
uses, by changing the scale of the analysis. Marine marshes,
mangroves, wetlands and coral reefs are all essential for the protection
of future fish resources. It is in the coastal areas that these protected
areas can be found, easier to define on land than at sea. These areas
are in the custody of the French “Coastal Protection Agency”
( Conservatoire du Littoral en France ) on the one side, and “Marine
Protected Areas” on the other side, at the global scale. The protection
of nature is a political acknowledgment in the full meaning of the
word of this heritagization: it is apparent that the effort has been
constant for at least three decades and that beyond the display of
principles, it is of course in the field that the actual protection is
moving forward. This in spite of the pressure, on the one hand, of