Strategic Plan
The PPGCMT aims to become the main reference in the country in the socio-environmental problematic in coastal areas and oceans, as well as achieve international quality in the quadrennial evaluation of CAPES 2017-2020. For this, the PPGCMT approved on November 14, 2017 a strategic planning in the period 2017-2020 with a clear establishment of goals and actions in the short, medium and long term, pertinent to the proposed objectives regarding management, training of students and intellectual production, aiming to reach the level of international excellence (level 6).
The plan has 9 goals including: strategy, how to achieve the goal, who would be responsible, the deadline, and the priority level. To achieve it and get financial support, a project was sent to the CAPES/FUNCAP Edital for consolidation of excellence courses, which was invested around 100 thousand reais. Goal 1 was the website in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Besides, the selection process occurs in these three languages due to the publication of the edict in these languages. Therefore, the goal was achieved in this four-year period. Goal 2 is the reduction in the average time to graduate with doctoral and master’s degrees, which was significantly reduced in the period between 2017 and 2019. However, in 2020 this indicator was disregarded by CAPES due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic that affected the time to degree not only in the PPGCMT but in all courses in Brazil. Goal 3 was achieved with the annual offering (2018, 2019, and 2020) of Fortaleza’s Austral Spring School. An international course, in English, with great international reach
Goal 4 planned in 2017 was achieved with the insertion of foreign co-supervisors in the theses and new foreign collaborating professors in the face of additional financial support with UFC, CAPES (School of Higher Studies and CAPES Print) and FUNCAP. Goal 5 was the offer of vacancies extended by the OAS (Organization of American States). In the last 3 years, the PPGCMT was the course that offered the most vacancies in the UFC in an OAS edict with, at least, 2 specific vacancies. Besides this, the announcement in Spanish and English has facilitated the reception of foreign students. Goal 6 was achieved in the four-year period with the nucleation and the start of the DINTER (2020) together with IFCE in several campuses in the interior of Ceará. In addition, it was possible to collaborate for the consolidation of the Postgraduate Program in Oceanography and Marine Resources Management at the University of Cape Verde (UniCV), Africa, with the in-person visit of professors in 2018 and 2019, and offering distance learning courses. Goal 7 involved the occurrence of annual seminars together with society in the form of the SEA WEEK involving companies, NGOs, the Brazilian Navy, universities, and public agencies. Goal 8 was the restructuring and updating of the areas of concentration and lines of research. This goal planned on November 14, 2017 was also achieved in 2018. Finally, the exponential increase in scientific dissemination was also obtained through strong action with local, national and international media as can be seen in the technical production indicators, being one of the leading programs of the Environmental Science committee in institutional visibility and popularization of science.
This strategic planning aimed to reach a high level in the training of human resources in the area of Environmental Sciences with a focus on the cross-cutting axis of coastal zones and the Ocean; a common good of great national (“Blue Amazon”) and international importance. The UN has declared that as of 2021 is the “decade of the oceans” due to the serious socio-environmental problem existing in the planet’s oceans and that the technical and scientific knowledge is quite reduced compared to the continental environment. To achieve this goal, the PPGCMT has been investing in interdisciplinarity, acting in national and international networks funded in calls for proposals from the European Union, Latin America (OAS) and the United States, as well as in the diversity of its faculty and students and in attracting students and international projects. The reformulation of the names of the course’s research lines was widely discussed in the collegiate, approved in the Pro-Rector of Graduate Studies and was implemented in 2018, as well as the internationalization strategies that are already strong and were expanded with national edicts (CAPES-Print) and external fomentation in 2019 and 2020 aiming to provide institutional support, as foreseen in its strategic planning approved on November 14, 2017.
