One of these projects, ROBUST (a precursor study to F-ECTS), addressed the way ecosystems cope with environmental change. It focused on 'buffering capacities', arising from both physical and biological processes in coastal lagoon ecosystems (of sea-grasses, macroalgae and microbial communities). Its mechanistic study may allow vulnerability assessments to be made, but its focus was on understanding processes within the system, and external or enhanced climatic forcing was largely beyond the scope of the research.

Several projects looked at understanding the scale and impacts of pollution and other human alterations of the environment. POPCYCLING produced a mass balance model for anthropogenic pollutants; TOROS explored the biological processes pertaining to trace metal regulation of primary productivity; MAMCS, MOE and MERCYMS addressed the serious problems of mercury and heavy metal pollution, and as such have little direct connection to climate change research. However, the baseline temperature and irradiation data generated in these projects may be of use, and this should be borne in mind in dissemination.

Several projects exploring the relationships between nutrient supply, biodiversity and primary productivity have already been described in the previous sections. Other ELOISE projects in this area have contributed to more fundamental understanding, with less attention to external (climatological) forcing. MEAD and SIGNAL both contribute baseline data for atmospheric deposition, with particular attention to the anthropogenic enhancement of nutrient supply. COMWEB's key task was fundamental research on food web structure and functioning; BASIC aimed to identify the short timescale controls on cyanobacterial communities;and BIOCOMBE also addressed the consequences of changes in biodiversity and community dynamics on ecosystem functions. All these projects contributed towards the development of assessment criteria for the state of ecosystems, and the parameterisation of response functions for use in modelling those systems. While this knowledge is vital, is it several steps away from being integrated into climate change science.

Despite the great uncertainties that remain in nutrient and pollutant biogeochemistry, that science is comparatively well-advanced in contrast with the understanding of sources, nature and fates of dissolved organic material in the coastal zone. DOMAINE addressed these fundamental questions, while DOMTOX investigated the potential for organic nutrient species to promote the growth of harmful or nuisance blooms in the coastal environment. COMET also focused on the characterisation of the organic material, contributing to the understanding of its behaviour and interaction with other dissolved species in the aquatic environment. This knowledge will ultimately be consolidated into the understanding of biogeochemical cycles (this is already underway; for example, the organic component of atmospheric aerosol is being considered in ANICE, but until that happens, very little can be inferred about its connections with climate change.

EUROTOPH and DANLIM both test hypotheses about the role of anthropogenic drivers in eutrophication, and integrate the changes in biota with physical processes. NTAP and OAERRE explicitly link physical and biological processes to aid understanding of the scale and patterns of eutrophication. DANUBS, STREAMES, MANTRA-EAST extend this knowledge in the development of models for use in integrated management tools. Like most other projects in this section, the questions being addressed by these tools are either too local in scale or too specific in remit to be consolidated into climate change models, and conversely, climate change manifestations may be too weak to be a significant forcing variable for inclusion in these models.

COSA, investigating the biocatalytic effects of sands, is rather an outlier in terms of this analysis, with little immediately evident connection to climate change. The remaining projects in the ELOISE programme, however, despite their lack of direct links, have furthered the process of integration of science, and have generated prototype tools of the sort that will facilitate society's responses to the environmental changes related to global climate change.

The BEAM project is one of few large scale initiatives that recognise the difficulties of understanding and managing multiple interacting effects. By looking at combination and synergistic effects of multiple pollutants, this project represents a real advance in risk assessment methodology. Given that climate change will act in synchrony with other global changes (e.g., rising temperatures coinciding with with greater particulate loadings in the atmosphere and higher nitrogen emissions as a result of the greater human population), a meta-appraisal of this process may well be of great value in terms of its potential for framing methodologies for multi-forcing impacts.

The final set of projects comprises tool-development projects to help sustainable decision-making and action-taking. BBCS was a cross-sectoral sustainability study on a small regional scale, researching improved ways to bring the natural and human systems into the same environmental analysis; DITTY similarly took a cross-sectoral approach in its efforts to develop an integrated IT tool for environmental management. COASTVIEW and TIDE developed support tools using models of morphological and ecological dynamics, with a strong focus on visualisation and parameterisation. A ll these innovations represent important progress for sustainable action in our highly complicated Earth system.