Assunção Cristas

Assunção Cristas is an associate professor at the Nova School of Law. she also chairs Introduction of Law and the newly created chair of Law and Sustainability, as well as coordinating the school's Master's degree in Law and Economics of the Sea – The Governance of the Sea, where she teaches Ocean Policies. She is also the director of NOVA Ocean, a knowledge center created in 2021 to develop research in the area of the sea. She has also been dedicated to preparing the interdisciplinary degree "Ocean", which will add five Faculties to the NOVA University of Lisbon and the Universities of the Algarve and Évora. Her research interests focus on issues of sustainability, architecture, and legislative development.

She has been part of Vieira de Almeida since 2022 and is responsible for the ESG Integrated Services Platform and the Environment area, which includes the sea and agriculture. In this context, she has developed several works.

Additionally, between September 2009 and January 2020, she has held various political functions. From 2011 exclusively, she was the Portuguese Minister of Agriculture, Sea, Environment and Spatial Planning (2011-2013) and the Minister of Agriculture and the Sea (2013-2015); Member of the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic (2009-2011 and 2015-2020); Chairman of the political party CDS-PP (2016-2020) and Vice-President (2009-2016); Councilor of the Lisbon City Council (2017-2021).

In the context of her work as Minister, she was responsible, among other things, for the institutional reorganization of various areas of administration, for participating in the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention, for negotiating the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, for the development of structuring legislation, such as the primary law for the planning and management of maritime space. In the area of the sea, she was responsible for the National Strategy of the Sea 2013-2020 and especially active in the international agenda, having organized and hosted the Lisbon the Blue Week (2015) which brought together 70 members of governments and multilateral agencies and approved a Declaration on the "Blue Economy".