With climate change, coastal areas are faced with unprecedented sea level rise and flooding, raising questions as to how societies will choose to adapt. One option is to strengthen existing sea walls to maintain current land uses; however, scientists, policy-makers and conservationists increasingly see the benefits of managed realignment, which is a nature-based coastal adaptation that involves the conversion of reclaimed farmland back to wetlands, allowing periodic local flooding in designated areas to reduce the risk of flooding downstream. We interviewed sixteen local organisations, landowners and farmers, and held workshops with 109 citizens living the Inner Forth estuary in eastern Scotland, to examine how managed realignment is supported by stakeholder attitudes and their engagement. Most of the farmers we interviewed prefer strengthened sea walls, to maintain their livelihoods and agricultural heritage. Citizens and local organisations were mainly supportive of managed realignment, because it provided wildlife and flood regulation benefits. However, we identified several barriers that could present obstacles to implementing managed realignment, for example, uncertainty whether it would support their principles of economic and rational decision-making. Our findings suggest that the local capacity to cope with rising sea levels is limited by lack of engagement with all relevant stakeholder groups, the limited scope of existing stakeholder partnerships, and poor short-term funding prospects of landscape partnerships that would facilitate collaboration and discussion. We suggest that including citizens, landowners, farmers and industries would strengthen existing stakeholder deliberation and collaboration, and support the Inner Forth's transition towards a more sustainable future shoreline.

Agricultural land is crucial for the production of food and is, thereby, directly connected to food security. Agriculture is threatened by a multitude of hazards, such as climate change, peak oil, peak soil and peak phosphorus. These hazards call for a more resilient food system that can deliver food security for the global population in the future. In this paper, we analyse the Baltic Sea region’s ten European Union (EU) member states, investigating which trends are to be found in statistics between 2005 to 2016 on the development of agricultural land. In our paper, we analyse these trends of agricultural land by looking at three categories of data: (1) utilised agricultural area, (2) number of farms and (3) agricultural labour input. The results showed a trend that agricultural land is increasingly dominated by large farms, whilst over 1 million predominantly small farms have disappeared, and agricultural-labour input has dropped by more than 26%. These trends point towards a mechanisation of production, where larger and less labour-intensive farms take over production. This could partly be due to the EU common agricultural policy, which tends to favour large farms over small. Further, we argue for the importance of farm-size diversity, and about the dangers to food security that a system that is dominated by large farms possesses. Lastly, we conclude that the concept of resilience needs to be better included in policy development and food-system planning, and that more research needs to be done, analysing how existing agricultural policies impact the parameters studied in this paper.