We welcome our PhD fellow Claudia at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

We are very happy to introduce our next COUPLED fellow, Claudia!

Claudia Parra Paitan (ESR 07), supervised by Peter Verburg, will be working on the research project Environmental impact assessments in a telecoupled world, based at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Claudia comes from Lima, the capital city of Peru. She has a Bachelor in Biology from the Peruvian National Agrarian University (UNALM) and a Master degree (M.Sc.) in Human Ecology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). For four years, Claudia worked for development cooperation agencies (such as UNDP, GIZ, BTC) and for the Peruvian Ministry of Environment in the strategic implementation of agricultural projects related to sustainable land use management and climate change adaptation. She also has experience with the policy-making processes of governmental initiatives related to environmental research, climate change adaptation, desertification and sustainable land use management.

Throughout these experiences, she realized the outstanding importance of the social and environmental impacts of large-scale actions over local conditions, and vice versa. Thereby, her main interest is to evaluate the impacts of one of the biggest factors affecting land and ecosystems: global commodity chains. This has driven her motivation for doing a PhD within the COUPLED project since it explicitly addresses the complex interactions arising from telecoupled social-ecological systems affecting land-use at multiple scales. In this context, she will study the indirect and distant environmental impacts of global commodity chains that arise as a result of the complex interactions of telecoupled systems, but that are not usually accounted for in environmental impact assessment studies.

Again, a warm welcome to you, Claudia! We are looking forward to a successful cooperation in the upcoming years.

You can find more information about Claudia’s research project here.