Last Update March 28, 1996

The Florida Coastal Management Program (FCMP) has added an important management tool to improve its vision in dealing with the future of Florida's coastal areas. The tool is an indicator system that provides a comprehensive perspective of the important environmental, growth management, economic, and social values associated with the coast. This system provides a means of evaluating Florida's progress in protecting its coastal areas, provides a basis for making strategic decisions about programs and financial resources, and provides information about coastal issues and problems to other decision-makers and the general public. FCMP has contracted with the Florida Center for Public Management (FCPM) of the Florida State University to assist in the design and development of such a system, the Florida Assessment of Coastal Trends (FACT).

The first step in the indicator development process was to initiate an issue and sub-issue development process designed to identify the critical, strategic issues facing Florida’s coastal future over the next five to twenty years. These issues and their defining sub-issues would then be used to provide the organizational framework for identifying the required indicators. On January 24, 1995 a workshop was convened and a number of coastal experts representing a range of coastal policy interests spent a day discussing coastal priorities. The principal product of their deliberations was the development of a list of nine strategic issues facing Florida’s coastal areas. These issues are as follows:

• Impact of Growth in the Coastal Zone
  
• Disruption of Coastal Physical Processes
  
• Responding to Coastal Threats and Hazards
  
• Degradation and Restoration of Coastal Ecosystems
  
• Managing Fresh Water Allocation
  
• Sustaining the Human Uses of the Coast
  
• Balancing Public and Private Uses of Resources
  
• Preservation of Cultural and Aesthetic Resources
  
• Encouraging Public Awareness and Involvement

The final activity of the workshop was to examine each issue and brainstorm potential indicators to be included in the system.

Over the next several months, appropriate indicators were developed and organized according to each issue, and these indicators comprise the body of FACT. Each indicator is displayed in a standardized format that reflects the reasons for its inclusion, identifies technical information regarding its source, format, and limitations, and provides a brief analysis and/or graphical display of any trends associated with the indicator. In addition, each indicator displays certain conceptual information commonly used to characterize indicators concerning the availability of data for the indicator and the strength of the information supporting the indicator. Discussion of those conceptual frameworks and others used to support this system is included in the Introduction.

There are several uses of FACT for future consideration. FACT has the potential for providing the issue structure for the first step in the conduct of a comparative risk assessment for Florida’s coast. Such a study would be the first conducted on a major coastal area in the nation and would provide Florida with extensive, quality documentation and analysis of its major coastal issues, creating a strong basis for the development of a strategic plan. The existence of FACT as a measurement system for such a plan would create a powerful, credible planning tool for Florida.

FACT can also be used as a foundation for the development of a state of the coast report. FACT is technical in nature and is intended to discuss individually and independently each of the indicators in the system. The natural extension of an indicator system is a summary report that attempts to integrate the independent information that is provided in a collection of individual indicators into a coherent discussion of the status and trends associated with the system -- a Florida State of the Coast Report.

Of the unresolved potential indicators remaining in the framework, some will have no reasonable source of data from which a quality indicator can be developed. These indicators will remain available for future investigation and, hopefully, for successful resolution. There will be another group of potential indicators, however, that are fully attainable, but which have not been included in the system because their data collection and development require significant personnel or financial investment beyond what is reasonable given the objectives and resources of this project. A reasonable next step would be to begin to develop these more expensive and methodologically complex indicators and include them in the system.

FCPM is presently planning to display the FACT document in its entirety on the Internet in a Netscape format. Opportunities exist, however, to make FACT considerably more interactive on the Internet by tying it to other coastal information with hypertext, more specialized graphics, video, and photographs. Further, FACT and associated information could be made available in CD ROM format.

Lastly, environmental indicator development has been successfully used as a foundation for an extensive block of instruction in high school environmental science classes. FACT could be used as the foundation for the development of high school classroom curricula concerning coastal issues.