The European project CERES, which just has been launched, will focus on the impact of climate change impact on most important fishes, crustaceans and shellfish populations in Europe, its habitats and the economic activities that depend on these species.

 Around a hundred researchers from 26 European centers are involved in this project. Among them, there is the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA CSIC-UIB), as a coordinator, the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM) of the CSIC and four more centres from the Oceanography Spanish Institute (IEO), as well as small and medium enterprises.

The CERES project (acronym for Climate change and European aquatic RESources) is aimed at promoting tools and developing adaptation strategies allowing fisheries and aquaculture sectors to anticipate and prepare for adverse changes or future benefits of climate change.

“Working with affected industries, CERES will help to develop innovative adaptation strategies to foresee threats and facilitate the access to opportunities, one of the main objectives of the UE blue growth strategy”, says Ignacio Catalan, a researcher at the  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.

“Research will be focused in 32 important commercial species in European area –from the 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 sectors: 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.

Research will be focused in 32 important commercial species in European area

Francesc Maynou is the project leader of the ICM's team: “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 are also involved Montserrat Ramón and Anna Sabatés, scientists at the Renewable Marine Resources department, and Carles Pelejero, ICREA researcher at the  Oceanography and Marine Biology department of the ICM.

CERES project is funded with more than 5,5MEuros by Horizon 2020 programme and will be developed during four years, from 2016 to 2020.