Marcia Moreno-Báez

Professor Marcia Moreno Báez is a Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She has extensive experience in coastal and marine conservation and fisheries management in Mexico, with a particular focus on the Gulf of California, and has contributed to numerous conservation and restoration planning initiatives across the region, Mexico, and internationally.

Professor Moreno Báez has over 25 years of experience applying geospatial tools across government, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. She teaches courses on geospatial technology, focusing on the development and application of spatial methods for territorial and marine planning, fisheries management, and natural resource governance.

Her research lies at the intersection of the regenerative blue economy, coastal small-scale fisheries, and the design of geospatial and decision-support tools for improved governance. Adopting an interdisciplinary socioecological systems approach, she develops and applies spatial analyses and integrative frameworks to generate actionable knowledge that enhances the participation of small-scale fishing communities in decision-making across scales. Her work identifies priority areas for regenerative interventions and evaluates enabling conditions—including governance structures, technological access, human capacity, and financial mechanisms—that influence implementation outcomes. This approach advances community-led resource management while informing policy and investment strategies that promote ecological sustainability, economic viability, and social resilience.

She is affiliated with the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy (CIERP), the Climate Policy Lab, and the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security, all based at Tufts. She is also co-founder and advisor of dataMares, an initiative that improves access to scientific data and knowledge; a co-founder of Watershed Management Group, a nonprofit organization advancing community-based watershed conservation, sustainable water management, and landscape resilience; a collaborating professor with the Nippon Foundation's Ocean Nexus program; and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on the Regenerative Blue Economy.