Maria Apolonia, MSc

Senior Consultant

Maria joined Aquatera in 2022 and plays a pivotal role in strategic planning and business development for Southeast Asia and Europe, focusing her work on envisioning, capturing, and actioning integrated and innovative methodologies to achieve sustainable marine resources management and decrease carbon emissions while ensuring vulnerable communities’ empowerment and resilience to climate change. She provides technical assistance and support to projects on a range of topics such as ocean energy, aquaculture, Energy Transition, shipping and ports decarbonization, digitalization for flexible and resilient energy systems, and marine plastics.

Since joining the team, she has been actively contributing to efforts to establish Aquatera's position in the emerging marine energy industry. Maria provides expertise and manages projects for international development programmes, particularly in Indonesia. Her role also involves stakeholder engagement, capacity building and workshop planning and delivery, as well as preparing grant applications for tenders focused on sustainable development in Southeast Asia, as well as EU-funded calls.

Maria is deeply passionate about fostering a world where healthy oceans coexist with economic development and thriving coastal communities. Her primary interests lie in studying sustainable and scalable models, effecting change in business practices, improving sector governance, and driving innovative and multidisciplinary decarbonization solutions within the realm of ocean-based initiatives.

Maria holds an MSc in Environmental Systems Management Engineering and a Post-Graduate in Sea Science and Business Innovation. She has a robust background in Life Cycle Assessment and GHG accounting, regulatory frameworks for marine renewable energy, and the development of tools and best practices for environmental and socioeconomic impact assessment methodologies. Her adaptability ranges from being guest speaker at international conferences and authoring academic papers, to assisting scientific scuba diving missions and marine mammal observation campaigns for ocean energy projects.

Previously, Maria held a role as a Research Engineer and Project Manager for WavEC Offshore Renewables and worked as part of the implementation team of the successful creation of the AIR Centre, a multi-government Atlantic Ocean research centre initiative.