Project description
Enhancing Cyprus’ capacity in coastal environment and marine pollution assessments
The Eastern Mediterranean has experienced rapid warming, leading to marine heatwaves and the loss of native species. Marine pollutants, such as heavy metals and litter, affect both aquatic life and humans. Cyprus still needs to enhance its capacity for achieving effective management and policymaking for the conservation of regional marine ecosystems. The EU-funded PUREEF-Y project aims to bolster the scientific excellence and policymaking influence of the Cyprus Marine and Maritime Institute (CMMI) by facilitating its collaboration with two leading research organisations. The project will assess key parameters collected from coastal ecosystems affected by climate change and ocean acidification and study levels of marine pollution affecting important marine habitats. It will also include capacity-building and networking activities.
Objective
Over the last century and recent decades, the Eastern Mediterranean have warmed faster than most other inhabited regions. In the marine environment, marine heatwaves are known to result in dramatic loss of native species. Further, marine pollutants, like heavy metals and litter, are additional stressors which can be transported from sediment/water column and bio-accumulate in food webs with direct impact on aquatic organisms and humans. Effective management and policymaking are therefore required for the conservation of regional biota. However, Cyprus still lacks capacities and knowledge in the Environment sector, through prioritised in the recently updated Smart Specialisation Strategy for Cyprus.
Thus, PUREEF-Y aims at enhancing the progress of the coordinating partner – CMMI, a H2020 Teaming Centre of excellence– towards scientific excellence and policymaking influence by deploying efficient and long-term capacity-building and networking activities with two internationally recognised advanced partners from Israel and Spain.
The activities will go beyond the strictly scientific scope and support the mutual development, consolidation, and reinforcement of administrative, dissemination, networking and policy-making competencies.
The progress achieved will be demonstrated via a joint research project during which partners will perform baseline assessments of the physicochemical parameters collected from coastal sediments and waters likely to be affected by climate change and ocean acidification; marine pollution levels in key sites around Cyprus, and the health status of key shallow water benthic and planktonic habitats.
Over 3 years, PUREEF-Y will result in a long-term linkage between CMMI, UAB and IOLR who share the mission of better understanding past (paleo) and present ecological conditions and designing management plans for monitoring, conservation & restoration, and policy reforms for the future.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycoastal geography
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
6300 Larnaca
Cyprus