Marta Pascual

Head of Spanish National Hub Blue Economy at WestMED (Western Mediterranean Initiative)

Marta Pascual is the Spanish National Hub for the Western Mediterranean Initiative (WestMED) as well as for the Atlantic Action Plan.

She has also been appointed as an expert working for the EU MSP Platform and has also been working as a Senior Expert for the EU Commission in works related to Maritime Spatial Planning, Blue Growth, Blue Economy, Circular Economy, Natural Capital Accounting, Biodiversity modelling and Ecosystem Services modelling.

Academically, she holds a PhD in Maritime Spatial Planning, is a former Ikerbasque Post-Doctoral Researcher and currently an Associated Researcher at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3, Spain), where she is advancing with the Eco-modelling Research Team on the development of marine ecosystem services models using ARIES (a semantic-modelling platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine reasoning following the FAIR principles).

She has more than 14 years of professional experience in the application and implementation of various European environmental and maritime directives such as the MSFD; MSPD; Habitats and Birds Directive, WFD.

Her experience in research includes various lines of spatial analysis, stakeholder engagement, scenario mapping, participatory mapping and marine and coastal research applied to maritime policies such as MSP, Ecosystem Services Mapping/Modelling, Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Biological Valuation and Ecosystem Services Valuation (ESV).