Firdaous Halim joined the EqualSea Lab in 2022 as a Ph.D. student in Marine Science, Technology, and Management at the International Campus of Excellence Do*Mar, University of Santiago de Compostela. She is also a Research Fellow within the Horizon 2020 project MaCoBioS – Marine Coastal Ecosystem Biodiversity and Services in a Changing World at the cE3c/AGB – Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes, Azorean Biodiversity Group, Azores University.

In her Ph.D., Firdaous is investigating methodologies for evaluating the socio-economic effectiveness of environmental management interventions, specifically Nature-based Solutions. She intends to co-develop methodologies with stakeholders for assessing the socio-economic effectiveness of these solutions implemented to support climate change adaptation in coastal and marine ecosystems.

Firdaous is a maritime spatial planning expert whose main work focuses on the North-Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea basins. She has supported various regional projects, such as the MSPglobal initiative of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO) as a regional consultant, The Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Tsunami Early Warning and Mitigation System in the North-eastern Atlantic, the Mediterranean and connected seas at IOC-UNESCO, and the GPS Azores project – Geographical and Geopolitical Scenarios in Maritime Spatial Planning for the Azores and North Atlantic (Azores University).