Elena Fontán’s Master Thesis: a new resilience index

Last Friday, Elena Fontán Alende, member of Future Oceans Lab defend her Master Thesis about European industrial fisheries and resilience, entitled: “Climate Change Adaptation in industrial fishing: social-ecological analysis of impacts and adaptation”.

She is enrolled in the intercollegiate Oceanography master at the University of Vigo, where she is spetializing in Ocean & Climate. The novel approach taken in this dissertation was developed under Elena Ojea direction and the decision of the committee was to qualify this work with honors.

Elena presented a new methodology to build up an index based on the potential resilience of a fishery, operationalizing resilience factors in three dimensions; ecological, socioeconomic and institutional. For developing the index she took into account two commercial species from European waters that are already shifting due to the increasing temperatures according to ICES Advice 2017. The outcomes will be publish soon, and will help to understand the capacity of European countries to adapt to climate change.