Catarina Frazão Santos in the RTP Programme Biosfera
How can the Blue Economy be combined with Marine Conservation? MARE researcher Catarina Frazão Santos answers this question in the latest episode of RTP's Biosfera programme. 
Portugal currently has one of the largest marine territories in the world, making up around 97 per cent of its territory and including 73 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Despite this, Portugal is still a long way from meeting international targets: to have around 30 per cent of marine ecosystems in MPAs by 2030, with 10 per cent fully protected. MARE researcher Catarina Frazão Santos also pointed out a problem with establishing these areas in Portugal on the RTP Biosfera programme.
‘What often happens is that we have many Marine Protected Areas that are ‘paper parks’, in other words, they are formally MPAs but then they don't have management measures that accompany that designation and that actually guarantee protection,’ she said. Portugal is currently following the model that is being developed across Europe, which according to Catarina Frazão Santos is ‘a model more focused on a more sustainable blue economy, and therefore the priority is not conservation, even though sustainability is’.
In order to establish a Marine Protected Area, it must be part of a marine spatial plan, a process that organises the activities that take place at sea. These processes make it possible to ‘reduce conflicts between the use’ of marine space, and between this use and environmental pressures, and it is therefore a ‘process that in the last two decades has gained enormous prominence and spread throughout the world’, being developed in more than 100 countries worldwide and in all ocean basins.
Catarina Frazão Santos emphasised that ‘if we want the use of marine space to be sustainable in the long term, we have to change this paradigm of conservation on the one hand and economics on the other, because we will only have economics in the long term if we actually have the goods and services that ecosystems provide and which underpin the whole blue economy’.
With the development of climate change, these development plans must now take other factors into account. Ocean warming and acidification cause the redistribution of marine resources, while extreme phenomena can affect infrastructure and the safety of maritime activities. ‘The areas we allocate to a particular activity today will not necessarily be the areas where that activity will be able to develop in 20 years‘ time,’ the researcher explains. ‘Climate change is mentioned in many plans. Combating the negative effects of climate change is often recognised in planning objectives, but then in practice there are practically no plans that have measures to deal with this challenge.’
Catarina Frazão Santos led the study that developed a strategy for climate-smart marine spatial planning. This study resulted in 10 key elements for intelligent marine spatial planning, such as the integration of climate information through species distribution models and risk and vulnerability analyses.
To access the episode click HERE
To access the study by Catarina Frazão Santos click HERE