Monitoring the state of the Solent

The development of the State of the Solent report and establishment of a set of coastal and marine indicators to measure the ‘health’ of the Solent was one of the original Flagship Projects developed when the Solent Forum was established in 1992. It was recognised that integrated coastal zone management requires robust indicators of sustainability that gauge the ‘health’ of the coast in relation to environmental, economic and social activity. The indicators selected for the Solent were, as far as possible, nested within established indicator sets that had been developed at the national and European levels. In developing the coastal sustainability indicators for the Solent and publishing the State of the Solent reports, a number of lessons were learned related to data compilation and the benefits of a participatory process to develop the indicators.