Spain has a National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change and it underlines the need to develop specific plans for the different sectors. This is precisely the general objective of the Aquadapt project, a work led by the Campus do Mar whose main objective is to contribute to the adaptation of the marine aquaculture sector, and more specifically the cultivation of turbot, sea bream and sea bass, three species of great economic interest, to the effects of climate change in the national territory. Last Tuesday, November 28, the launch meeting took place in a day held in the Miralles building and brought together the main actors involved in the project, a work that has the participation of the universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela and the collaboration and involvement of the productive sector, represented, among others, by the Galician Aquaculture Cluster and the Andalusian Aquaculture Technology Center (Cetaqua).
For the first time, the development of an adaptation plan in the marine aquaculture sector throughout Spain is being addressed in the 2050 horizon, structured by cultivated species and cultivation system, and which will be accompanied by a short-term action plan. “It is about studying the possible impacts that climate change can have on the cultivation of these three species and designing an adaptation plan, solutions that we could start implementing before the possible consequences become reality”, explained Emilio Fernández, director of the Campus do Mar, who stressed the idea that the objective is to make a diagnosis of the situation, which will be what drives this adaptation plan and disseminate it to the entire sector. The idea is to have it completed by June 2018.
Emilio Fernández was accompanied at the presentation by Juan Manuel García de Lomas, managing director of the Andalusian Aquaculture Technological Center Cetaqua, a center in which more than 26 aquaculture companies participate and in which they work, as García de Lomas explained, to achieve the most favorable conditions for the development of aquaculture. Also present was Antonio Villanueva, technical coordinator of Infrastructures and Research of the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo, Ecimat, who was in charge of working out the details of a project financed with nearly 70,000 euros by the Biodiversity Foundation, of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Food and the Environment, Mapama, which selected this work -along with 67 others- from among nearly 400 proposals.
Emilio Fernández: “For us this project represents a huge challenge”
“This project aims to lay the foundations that allow the aquaculture sector to continue to maintain a fundamental leading position as a guarantor of the supply of aquaculture fish and that serve to guarantee the population a healthy, wholesome and tasty diet”, insisted the manager of Cetaqua Andalucía. “For us this project represents a huge challenge for two reasons. Firstly, because of the subject, climate change, a huge challenge from a scientific and also economic point of view”, explained Emilio Fernández, who referred to climate change as a problem with two major aspects, on the one hand the reduction of emissions, something that must be addressed from an international perspective “as we saw at the recent Bonn Summit” and, on the other, the adaptation component, much more local and sectoral, that is, each of the different economic sectors will be affected in a different way by climate change.
Along with this, the director of the Campus do Mar also highlighted a second challenge, “as important as the first”, in reference to the complexity of the project, since it addresses a thematically complex and very multidisciplinary issue, and because it brings together the scientific part and the productive sector in the same work. “It is a project in which the University and the technological centers associated with aquaculture and business associations are going to work together because in both parts there is knowledge and that knowledge must be totally permeable”, Fernández stressed, while emphasizing that from this union and the conjugation of both experiences is where an adaptation plan will emerge that does not remain a mere academic exercise, but can really be applied by the productive sector. “For us it is a project especially dear precisely because of this second condition, since it is one of the works in which we are going to work most closely with the sector and that is what encourages us to dedicate a lot of effort to it to try to make it a success”.
Coinciding with the celebration of National Aquaculture Day
The presentation of the project coincided with the week of celebration of National Aquaculture Day, an initiative launched by the Spanish Aquaculture Observatory and now in its sixth edition. Under the auspices of this celebration, a round table was organized with the participation of different experts: Ramón Gómez Gesteira, professor of the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Vigo, who delved into the effect of climate change on oceanographic variables; Alicia Estévez Toranzo, professor of the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, who focused on fish welfare and Juan Manuel Fernández, director of the Aquaculture Business Association of Spain, who provided the vision of the Spanish aquaculture production sector.
Part of the team involved in the project
Source: DUVI
