Horizon 2020 (2014 - 2020)

Assessment of Jellyfish Socioeconomic Impacts in the Mediterranean: Implications for Management: JELLYPACTS

Last update: Mar 1, 2021 Last update: Mar 1, 2021

Details

Locations:Spain
Start Date:Sep 1, 2016
End Date:Aug 30, 2020
Contract value: EUR 170,121
Sectors:Environment & NRM, Research Environment & NRM, Research
Categories:Grants
Date posted:Mar 1, 2021

Associated funding

Associated experts

Description

Programme(s): H2020-EU.1.3.2. - Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
Topic(s): MSCA-IF-2014-EF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF)
Call for proposal: H2020-MSCA-IF-2014
Funding Scheme: MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

Grant agreement ID: 655475

Objective:
Social and scientific concern about jellyfish (JF) blooms has risen over the past decades. This concern is reflected on the number of reports on JF; since 1941 the number of scientific publications on JF has doubled each decade, whilst news reports have increased by over 500% over the past two decades. Aggregations of JF can cause multitude of problems for different sectors of society; including the fishing industry and tourism. There is no doubt that the combination of a growing human population and the increasing use of the marine environment will lead to higher encounter rates between JF and humans. To add to the concern, there has been a heated scientific debate on whether JF populations might be on the rise. However, regardless of whether JF populations are increasing, there are no easy solutions to manage all the problems associated with JF blooms. Therefore, there is an urgent need to focus research objectives towards understanding the potential of a suite of management strategies to tackle current impacts of JF over ecosystem services. There are many existing strategies for managing JF blooms however, these are mostly economically expensive and thus, there is a need to evaluate whether the costs of implementing particular management policies will offset the costs of JF impacts. In order to device cost-effective management strategies, a focus on the interdisciplinary nature of JF impacts that includes ecological, social and economic aspects such as the associated loss of people’s wellbeing is of critical importance. Unfortunately, there is a knowledge gap on the socioeconomic impacts of JF and estimates are sparse and qualitative. The project proposed here has the overall goal to further the knowledge of the existing interactions between jellyfish and society by assessing the economic and social impacts stemming from their presence and the integration of this newfound knowledge into adaptive management policies.

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