Education

The EU-CONEXUS teaching, research and innovation programmes include the totality of social, economic and environmental problems and opportunities that coastline areas are facing today. Today’s challenges in urban and semi‐urban coastlines require an integrated management, risk assessment and planning by working across sectors and disciplines.

Reflecting the most important current social, economic, technical and environmental challenges impacting coastlines, the new study programmes and academic offers will be focused on four interdisciplinary study dimensions:

The focus “Environment and biodiversity” investigates risks and opportunities for the ecosystem: e.g. biodiversity, properties of the coastline, migration flows, life quality on coastlines, biotechnology/health, landscape planning, legal issues, and maritime engineering.

The “Digital transformation”, as one of the major transitions impacting our societies, entails studies on the legal, administrative, cultural implications of dematerialisation and of the valorisation of material (cultural heritage) or digital resources (data protection, data security, democratisation of the “internet of objects”, digital humanities’ resources)

The dimension “Energy and sustainable construction” is studied in laboratories working on construction/urban microclimate, the eco‐efficiency of energy, resilience (durability) of materials and construction works.

The focus “Culture, society, organisation, education” takes on a social sciences and humanities’ perspective and tries to define what “living on an urban coastline” means by, in particular, taking into account sustainability issues and thereby relating to the other three dimensions: environment, sustainable construction and digital transformation.

Study programmes

EU-CONEXUS partner universities offer a wide range of specialised degree programmes in the following discipline groups, covering smart urban sustainable coastal development from a global point of view: