Objective On May 30, 2002, the European Parliament and the Council adopted the Recommendation concerning the implementation of Integrated Coastal Zone Management with the aim of fostering the development of integrated management strategies to guide the European coastal zones towards more sustainable scenarios. In the framework of implementing the EU Recommendation, the European Commission created an Expert Group on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), which established a Working Group on Indicators and Data (WG-ID). The result of the work carried out by WG-ID has been the definition of a set of 27 indicators, drawn up for the assessment and monitoring of the state of the coast from the point of view of a sustainable development. In this context arises the Intereg IIIC-South DEDUCE project (DÈveloppement Durable des Zones CÙtiËres EuropÈennes), with the objective of validating the methodological tools necessary for an optimal decision making at the coast, following the principles and criteria established by the Recommendation. Working Lines The key challenge of DEDUCE is to prove the usefulness, viability and necessity of an integrated approach to information management by means of environmental and socioeconomic indicators for measuring the degree of sustainable development of the European coastal zones. Partners The participating partners work at a European, national, regional or local scale on integrated coastal zone management, and they can produce consistent and harmonized data between the different working scales. The partners are : Department of Environment and Housing, Catalan Parliament, Spain (Lead Partner) El Prat de Llobregat local council, Spain Viladecans local council, Spain Autonomous University of Barcelona- European Topic Centre Terrestrial Environment (ETC-TE), from the European Environment Agency, Spain French Environment Institute (IFEN), depending on the French Environment Ministry, France Malta Environment and Planning Authority (MEPA), Malta Province of West-Flanders, Belgium University of Latvia, Latvia Maritime Institute in Gdansk, Poland