Marine Spaces – Planning / Culture / Climate Programme (MS-PCC)

International initiatives like the UN 2030 Agenda and the EU Blue Growth Strategy emphasize ocean professionals with a cross-disciplinary expertise in the management of Maritime Cultural Heritage, the principles of Marine Spatial Planning, and aspects of Climate Science. Within the European Higher Education Area, however, there are no educational forums that provide the cross-disciplinary training necessary to fill this need. As a result, there is a coming skills gap that will impede national and international efforts to meet the goals established by these multinational policies, and have detrimental effects on the cultural and environmental resources they aim to protect.

The Marine Spaces – Planning / Culture / Climate (MS-PCC) Programme was the first stage in a broad initiative to establish a cross-disciplinary curriculum combining training in these three fields and establish a cohort of ocean professionals who can effectively and efficiently actualize these EU and International priorities. Supported by an Erasmus Mundus Design Measure (EMDM) grant between 2022 and 2023, partners in the MS-PCC programme developed a cross-disciplinary pedagogy for a combined training scheme in all three fields, and established the foundation to train students and educators in higher education institutions across Europe. To harness this potential, the MS-PCC partners have applied for additional Erasmus funding to support a three-year programme that will test our curriculum, and culminate in an open-access educational toolkit to be applied in a variety of sectors