The oceans have no borders and marine pollution is a problem that can be solved only by a transnational cooperative effort.
However, in order to implement a concerted action, the different authorities involved need to have a common understanding of what is happening and what are the impacts on the marine ecosystem.
ShareMED is an international research project that takes on this challenge in the Mediterranean context by following a twofold approach:
- One one side, the project addresses the scientific challenges of expanding our capabilities to observe, predict and assess the oceans, also including the biological dimension;
- The project also looks at the governance challenge of developing cooperative frameworks for sharing infrastructures, knowledge, data, and to achieve a joint assessment of the ecological state of transnational waters.
The result will be a new shared idea on how to build and manage a sustainable system of observing systems, to jointly address marine pollution and environmental threats.
ShareMed is an EU project funded by the Panoramed Interreg Med program, led by the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), and involving eleven partners from eight countries. The Physical Oceanography Research Group (Department of Geosciences) from the University of Malta is the Maltese partner in this project, led by Prof. Aldo Drago.