Catarina Frazão Santos | ERC Starting Grant - ENG

"What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica. Antarctica is fundamental to the health of the ocean as a whole, and it is fundamental to climate regulation. Everything that happens there, bad or good, will affect the three billion people who depend on coastal areas worldwide," says Catarina Frazão Santos, a researcher in the Department of Animal Biology at Ciências ULisboa and the Marine and Environmental Sciences Center (MARE), in this interview, about the award from the European Research Council (ERC).
The ERC start-up grant, worth almost 1.5 million euros, awarded to her project "Planning for the Sustainable Use of the Ocean in Antarctica in the Context of Global Environmental Change (PLAnT)", will enable a climate-smart marine spatial planning process for the first time.
"The development of climate-smart spatial plans is a priority for the European Commission and UNESCO over the next five years," says Catarina Frazão Santos, who believes in the worldwide societal impact of this project.
Catarina Frazão Santos supports the European Commission, the UN and the World Bank as a specialist in marine spatial planning and climate change. The marine biologist, or more correctly interdisciplinary scientist, is the founding editor-in-chief of the new journal of the "Nature" group, dedicated to ocean sustainability "npj Ocean Sustainability"; she is also a guest researcher at the University of Oxford and the NOVA School of Business and Economics. With a master's degree in Environmental Management and a PhD in Marine Sciences, she teaches Global Changes in the Ocean as part of the master's degree in Marine Ecology at Ciências ULisboa.
In this interview, Catarina Frazão Santos talks about herself, the objectives and expectations of the PLAnT project, and also reflects on the contribution of Ciências ULisboa to her professional career and the importance of this area of research.
"In the context of the new United Nations agreement on the High Seas, new attention is being paid to all spatial management instruments for international waters. Marine spatial planning, although not directly mentioned in the agreement, is a type of spatial management instrument," says Catarina Frazão Santos, adding that the opportunities and limitations of developing marine spatial planning in international waters have already been debated.
The researcher says that Antarctica is managed in a complex governance system and that the PLAnT project proposes a new, impartial vision that doesn't depend on political issues.
For Catarina Frazão Santos, a paradigm shift is needed: "We definitely need to change the way we think about managing the ocean and nature in general. First of all, we have to realize that we're not managing the ocean, we're managing the way people deal with the ocean, use the ocean, protect the ocean. This has a lot to do with education, awareness, literacy. We have to stop seeing conservation and development as opposites. Conservation has to be the basis of development, otherwise development is not sustainable."
The PLAnT project is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2024.