ERC projects
The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) has been awarded eight European Research Council (ERC) grants in three years, since 2015. Each project (of between 1.5 and 2 million euros) lasts for five years and allows the recruitment of a team of six or seven doctoral students and postdocs.
These are the ERC active projects:
Led by Eric Galbraith
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
The overarching goal of the BIGSEA Project is to develop new quantitative methods for including human activity as a directly-coupled component of Earth system models. The global ocean is an ideal testbed for this approach, given the relatively simple nature of human activity in the ocean, and rapid developments in simulating the marine ecosystem from ocean physics.
The BIGSEA Project is developing a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. The work is exploring new ways to represent human activity, well-being, and societal behaviour within a physically-based structure.
By considering the human-ocean system from this vantage point, some key questions emerge. These include:
- How can human experience, quantified on an individual, per-hour basis, be related to fishing activity in a simple, data-constrained way?
- How do animals influence the sinking flux of organic particles, and what does this mean for oxygen minimum zones, nutrient recycling and nutrient stoichiometry?
- Has ocean biogeochemistry been altered by the restructuring of marine ecosystems caused by fishing?
Led by Joan Martínez-Alier
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
Environmentalism is about Justice. Our economic system produces social and environmental injustices. Too many people, animals and plants are contaminated, displaced and killed. This is often linked to companies that provide our materials, food, water and energy. Communities and people try to resist pressures from these economic forces. But economic forces try to enforce increasingly violent digging and dumping on increasingly vulnerable and populated places. Alternative practices and narratives to the unsustainable economy exist and show the way forward.
The ENVJUSTICE project maps environmental conflicts along the supply chain.
The Action Plan of ENVJUSTICE comprises several points:
- The expansion and updating of the EJAtlas database.
- The production of scientific papers based on analysis of the EJAtlas database.
- The expansion of the vocabulary of the degrowth and environmental justice movements.
- Activities to spread awareness and contribute to the global environmental justice movement.
Led by Jeroen van den Bergh
"Advanced Grant" (AdG)
The project “Behavioral-evolutionary analysis of climate policy: Bounded rationality, markets and social interactions” (EVOCLIM) is aimed at improving climate policies.
The different existing climate policies are studied with incomparable approaches involving unique criteria and impact. The project led by Professor van den Bergh proposes uniting core features of such approaches within a behavioural-evolutionary framework, offering three advantages: evaluating the effectiveness of very different climate policy instruments in a consistent and comparative way; examining policy mixes by considering interaction between instruments from a behavioural as well as systemic perspective; and simultaneously assessing policy impacts mediated by markets and social interactions.
The resulting models will be used to assess the performance of policy instruments – such as various carbon pricing and information provision instruments – in terms of employment, equity and CO2 emissions. The project will culminate in improved advice on climate policy.
Led by Isabelle Anguelovski
"Starting Grant " (StG)
GREENLULUS (Green Locally Unwanted Land Uses) analyzes the conditions under which urban greening projects in distressed neighborhoods redistribute access of environmental amenities to historically marginalized groups. The study takes place in 40 cities in Europe, the United States, and Canada.
Our research assesses the extent to which urban greening projects such as parks, greenways or ecological corridors encourage and/or accelerate gentrification, given such projects have been recently shown to be factors contributing to residents’ exclusion and marginalization. Through an innovative FUG (Fair Urban Greening) index, we analyze which cities most equitably distribute the benefits of greening. We also provide new tools for municipal decision-makers to conduct an environmental equity performance analysis of new or restored green amenities. Lastly, our research included an in-depth analysis of cases of community mobilization and contestation, and of the policies and measures that municipalities develop to address exclusion in “greening” neighborhoods. Our hypothesis is that the social and racial inequities present in sustainability projects make green amenities Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) for poor residents and people of color.
Led by Victoria Reyes-García
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
LICCI – Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts: the contribution of local knowledge to climate change research – is a European Research Council (ERC) funded project aiming to bring indigenous and local knowledge to climate change research.
Through cutting-edge science, we strive to deepen our understandings of perceived climate change impacts, and endeavor to bring indigenous and local knowledge into policy-making processes and influence international climate change negotiations. The LICCI team is dedicated to creating a wide network, which encompasses researchers, practitioners, and the general public who are interested in indigenous and local knowledge systems and climate change.
Led by Antoni Rosell-Melé
"Advanced Grant" (AdvGr)
Tropical climates are changing rapidly in the most populated regions of the planet. The changes largely arise from alterations in the Hadley circulation driven by natural and anthropogenic factors, whose relative roles and temporal variability are unclear. These knowledge gaps are in part due to the shortage of methods to study the atmospheric circulation before the advent of instrumental and satellites observations, and compounded by the contradictions between models and palaeo-data.
The aim of the project is to develop an innovative palaeo-proxy approach to investigate the natural range of variability of the Hadley circulation during past episodes of extreme warmth and cold. The approach relies on the exploitation as climate proxy of an untapped but widespread material in marine sediments: windborne pyrogenic carbon (PyC) derived from savannah and grassland fires in the tropics.
Through the geochemical and isotopic spatial characterization of PyC, along with the analysis of mineral dust in the modern tropical deep ocean, and a PyC biogeochemical model, we will build an interpretative framework of PyC deposition in deep-sea sediments. Its application in Pliocene-Pleistocene sequences from the Atlantic and the Pacific will allow the reconstruction of past meridional and zonal shifts in the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the Southern hemisphere westerlies, and provide new constraints on the natural variability of the Hadley circulation and associated hydroclimates.
PALADYN is possible thanks to the combination of cutting-edge geochemical and satellite data, and GIS methodologies, with in-depth interdisciplinary expertise on the palaeoclimatic study of marine sediments. Researchers will provide new important datasets of windborne deep-sea PyC for testing and refining prediction models of atmospheric circulation, carbon cycle, precipitation and wildfires, issues which are of paramount global importance from scientific as well as societal standpoints.
Led by André Colonese
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
TRADITION is an ERC-Consolidator Grant funded research project that will assess the long-term development of small-scale fisheries in South America, and their legacy to present day food security and poverty alleviation.
Our interdisciplinary team, led by André Colonese, will investigate the historical ecology of subsistence fisheries along the Atlantic Forest coast of Brazil during major cultural and environmental events to test the hypothesis that fishing has played a role in supporting agricultural expansion in pre-Columbian times and during the historical colonization and urbanization of this region, and that this still echoes among present day artisanal fisheries.
The traditional knowledge of small-scale fisheries is seen as crucial in current debates and policies concerning sustainable fisheries and biodiversity, yet these fisheries and their actors are historically invisible in most tropical and subtropical regions. A thorough recognition of their socio‐economic and ecological importance requires an understanding of the scale of human interaction with marine environments and resources that transcends modern assessments and most historical records.
Led by Gara Villalba
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
Gara Villalba leds the ERC Consolidator Grant project “Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture” (URBAG). Nowadays, many cities are implementing green infrastructures despite having little quantitative and comprehensive knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are more effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature while reducing environmental impact.
Gara Villalba's research aims to find out how urban green infrastructures can be most efficient in contributing to urban sustainability, in order to improve the way cities function, in support to their inhabitants’ quality of life and their environments. This will evaluate which combinations of urban, peri-urban agriculture and green spaces result in the best performance in terms of local and global environmental impact.