Host

Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance (SCELG)

My fellowship is hosted by the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance (SCELG), based at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

New Marie Curie Fellow at SCELG: Exploring Rights for Ecosystem Services for local communities in Scotland and Italy

Strathclyde University is located in Glasgow, Scotland. It won eight Times Higher Education Awards for research and teaching achievements and was recognised five-star Overall Rating in the QS Stars University Ratings. It has more than 22,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, and has 59 research centres and units, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (where SCELG is based) has 7 schools and has strong links with governments, global organisations and academic networks.

SCELG focuses on legal research in environmental governance, looking from different perspectives and approaches at issues such as biodiversity, climate change, corporate accountability, economic law, fresh water, human rights, environmental justice, sustainable development, oceans, food and agriculture, and energy.

It hosts researchers, PhD students and visiting researchers coming from all over the world, hence being a hub of knowledge and exchanges of unique heterogeneity.

For more info on SCELG see News, Events and Publications.

SCELG activities

(Vancouver, Canada, 2010)

SCELG has numerous international partnerships aimed at sharing academic expertise with institutions such as the CBD Secretariat, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Institute for Environment and Development, the International Development Law Organisation, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The inter-disciplinary and multicultural environment of SCELG is a perfect fit for my project.

My project will contribute to SCELG’s ongoing collaboration with the Strathclyde Centre for the Study of Human Rights Law on topics on the crossection of human rights and biodiversity law, including in the context of the BeneLex Project and the One Ocean Hub. It will also engage in SCELG’s contributions to Scotland’s National Task Force on Human Rights Leadership.

SCELG experts are also involved in understanding Brexit’s impact on local community rights and conservation. They have submitted policy briefs on the implications for Scotland in the context of agriculture and fisheries, including local community rights, and on procedural environmental rights, and have contributed to a Scottish Universities Lawyers Network on Europe’s report on Brexit and environmental law. This expertise will support my fellowship in the analysis of EU and Scottish national law on conservation of the environment and local communities rights.

Covid-19 and Islands

Favignana

Vis à vis the Covid-19 crisis and as part of its EILEAN project, SCELG launched, in collaboration with Island Innovation, an initiative aimed at collecting responses from islands around the globe on the actions they have taken to limit the impact of Covid-19.

The preliminary results of the survey were published as Francesco Sindico, Giulia Sajeva, Nicola Sharman, Patricia Berlouis and James Ellsmoor, Islands and COVID-19: A Global Survey, Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance and Island Innovation, 2020.

The project evolved in a collaboration between SCELG, University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) and Islands Innovation called Covid-19 Island Insights Serie aimed at bringing together critical assessments of how specific islands around the world have performed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the extent to which their recovery plans can promote resilience and sustainability in the long term.

Supervisor

(Okawango Delta, Botswana, 2009)

My project will be supervised by Prof. Elisa Morgera, a world-leading expert in international and EU environmental law and its relationship with human rights, particularly indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ rights in the context of natural resources.

She is Professor of Global Environmental Law and was invited to contribute to the 2017 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment on biodiversity and human rights, and to the Scottish Government’s Roundtable on Brexit and the Environment, and was appointed by Scotland’s First Minister as the environmental rights expert of the Human Rights Leadership Advisory Group.

Among the many projects she is currently involved in, she has recently been awarded a FAO consultancy on indigenous peoples and local communities collective rights to land, territories and other natural resources. And I am currently involved in its drafting.

For a full list of Prof. Morgera’s publications, projects, and other related activities.