Climate change and the blue economy

Feasibility study for the development of a web tool for the sustainable management of the blue economy on the Spanish Mediterranean coast in the current context of Climate Change (Aquaculture, Fisheries and Tourism): ECOAZUL-MED.

Grant PTQ2020-011287, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.

The ECOAZUL-MED project, funded by the Torres Quevedo Spanish program, aims to generate a web tool for public use that provides detailed climate information derived from a set of regional coupled climate simulations (with atmosphere-ocean interaction) with high spatial resolution. The developed tool will allow us to anticipate the effects of climate change on aquaculture, fishing and coastal tourism on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, assuming different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions for the next 40 years. ECOAZUL-MED has a strong participatory approach that involves stakeholders from the three chosen sectors (aquaculture, fishing and coastal tourism) from the beginning of the project in the process of co-creation of the tool. The Mediterranean region was chosen in this project because it provides an amplified warm signal in response to climate change and is very favorable to the development of extreme events such as heat waves or intense precipitation. Therefore, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, highly populated and with an economy strongly linked to the sea, is likely to suffer negative socioeconomic impacts in the coming decades. The tool will offer companies, public administration and other agents involved relevant climate information that improves the planning of these economic activities and highlights the need for their innovation in order to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change in the coming decades. The added value of this project compared to other similar ones lies in four pillars:

1. the use of high-resolution regionaol coupled regional models, which makes downscaling dynamic and coherent from a physical point of view (this does not happen when global models are used, when the downscaling is statistical or when only atmospheric or oceanic regional models are used for downscaling);
2. we use both oceanic variables and atmospheric variables on land;
3. attention is paid to extreme weather events with the capacity to cause severe socioeconomic damage, such as heat waves; and
4. its participatory approach (co-creation) throughout the life of the project.