These days takes place in Palma de Mallorca the initial coordination meeting of the new international project CERES, which pretends to go in depth in the knowledge about the climate change impact on most important fishes, crustaceans and shellfishes populations in Europe, its habitats and the economic activities that depend on these species.
These days takes place in Palma de Mallorca the initial coordination meeting of the new international project CERES, which pretends to go in depth in the knowledge about the climate change impact on most important fishes, crustaceans and shellfishes populations in Europe, its habitats and the economic activities that depend on these species. There are a hundred researchers involved from 26 European centers, including the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA CSIC-UIB), as coordinating center, the ICM and four more centers from the Oceanography Spanish Institute (IEO), and also small and medium enterprises.
The CERES project (acronym for Climate change and European aquatic RESources) has as one of its objectives to promote tools and develop adaptation strategies that allow the fishing and aquaculture sector, and its management centers, to anticipate and be prepared for the future changes caused by climate change.
“Working with affected industries, CERES will help to develop innovative adaptation strategies to perceived threats and facilitate the access to opportunities, one of the main objectives of the UE blue growth strategy” informs Ignacio Catalán, researcher from IMEDEA and project leader from CSIC. The participants of CERES will cooperate tightly to define and test different climate change scenarios in political, environmental, social, technologic and legal level.
“Activity will be focused in 32 important commercial species in European area –from Mediterranean to Artic-, and inner areas in Turkey, Romania, north Scotland and Norway”, says Carlos García Soto, project leader from IEO. CERES will provide solutions for the sustainable growth of the aquatic food productive sector in Europe, in the context of climate change. It will mainly benefit three areas: European consumers –because food safety is an important topic in Europe-, fishing sector –because this sector is threaten by overfishing, price competence and climate change-, and European economy.
In ICM, Francesc Maynou is the project leader: “Our researchers will experimentally evaluate the effect of climate change (specifically, acidification and temperature rise) on aquiculture target species as mussel and clam, or in the production and distribution changes of small and medium pelagic fishes (sardine, anchovy and common dolphin fish) in occidental Mediterranean”. Together with Francesc Maynou, in this project also participate Montserrat Ramón and Anna Sabatés, from Renewable Marine Resources department, and Carles Pelejero from Oceanography and Marine Biology department and ICREA.
CERES project is funded with more than 5,5 million euros by Horizon 2020 programme and will be developed during four years, from 2016 to 2020. The principal Spanish Public Research Organisms (Organismos Públicos de Investigación, OPIs) collaborate in this new initiative of the Horizont 2020 European programme.