Marine research with ERC funding

ERC-funded marine research

Discover and learn more about research projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) on a variety of topics related to oceans and marine research watching the recording of our webinar. The event counted with the participation of ERC awardees and a team member working in Spain, France and Ireland.  Took place on 25 September 2024.

About the projects that were presented:

• ERC EQUALSEA project (Consolidator) - Transformative adaptation towards ocean equity

Carlos Sebastian Villasante Larramendi, Principal investigator, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Understanding inequality in society from ocean stressors
According to the United Nations, inequality is a defining challenge of the 21st century that impacts the well-being of people around the world. The oceans play an important part in this as they provide food, jobs, and space for recreation, amongst other vital things. With a focus on ocean equity, the EU-funded EQUALSEA project will shed light on how certain ocean stressors, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, affect marine protected areas and coastal communities and the impact of this on society. The project's work will analyse how transformative changes can be fostered to deal with ocean inequalities, and advance research in this field.

• ERC POSEIDON project (Starting) - Unconventional principles of underwater wave control in the sub-wavelength regime

Marco Miniaci, Principal investigator, CNRS, France

The growing interest in marine renewable energy and ocean-related human activities are the main causes of an alarming increase of the noise level in the oceans and seas. Nevertheless, the performance of underwater noise mitigation systems has since long been (and still is) limited by the fact that dissipation in linear systems is inherently poor at the sub-wavelength scale. Consequently, a viable solution to attenuate underwater waves over low, broadband, and multiple frequencies does not exist, yet. POSEIDON aims to tackle the intrinsic reasons for such a scientific / technological delay and declares an ambitious goal: to develop a new class of meta-screens allowing zero-transmission / zero-radiation over low and broadband frequencies exploiting rather than avoiding complexities stemming from heavy-fluid/structure interaction and exhibiting practical structural requirements, such as being compact, lightweight, and efficient under hydrostatic pressure.

• ERC 4-OCEANS project (Synergy) - Human History of Marine Life: Extraction, Knowledge, Drivers & Consumption of Marine Resources, c.100 BCE to c.1860 CE    

Carolina Chong Montenegro, team member from LAC, PI Francis Michael Ludlow, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

4-OCEANS aims to assess the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia. 
How did marine life affect and alter societies of the past? This is one of the key questions the EU-funded 4-OCEANS project seeks to answer by investigating the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia, from 100 BCE to 1860 CE. Bringing together expertise from marine environmental history, climate history, natural history, geography, historical ecology, genomics and zooarchaeology, the project will conduct the first-ever global assessment of the role of marine life in societal development and will consider how selected socio-economic, cultural and environmental forces limited as well as enabled marine exploitation.

To go further

Interested in the subject? Read our piece on the EU Mission ‘Restore ourOcean and Waters by 2030’.

About the ERC

Read more about the ERC, the calls 2025 and more resources here.

Set up in 2007 by the European Union, the European Research Council is the first European funding organisation for frontier research across all fields. It aims to stimulate scientific excellence in Europe. It selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age to run five to six-year projects in a public or private research organisation based in the countries of the European Research Area (ERA), that includes EU Member States and Associated Countries to the Framework Programme Horizon Europe.