Safeguarding biodiversity and human rights through law and regulation
We all rely on biodiversity and ecosystems for a broad range of human rights. Nature contributions to people range from provisioning us with a wide range of nutritious food to eat to purifying the water we drink. Healthy ecosystems help regulate climate and prevent floods, among many other nature contributions to people. Hence, good governance of biodiversity and ecosystems is interconnected with disaster risk reduction and building resilience to both sudden and slow-on set events associated with climate change and natural hazards. At the same time, sustainable governance of social-ecological systems requires respect for human rights such as the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and the right of freedom of expression and opinion. Human rights and biodiversity are reciprocal and interdependent. Hence, the need to bridge capacities between institutions working on these two fields.
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Claudia Ituarte-Lima
Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima is Leader of the Human Rights and the Environment thematic area and senior researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.
She is an international public lawyer and scholar with direct experience in international law and policy making. For the last 20 years, she has worked on human rights and environmental law (in particular biodiversity and climate change). She holds a PhD (University College London) and a MPhil (University of Cambridge).
Her work unites legal analysis and sustainability science for examining environmental and human rights governance challenges and innovative levers to address them. She has bridged the human rights and biodiversity “communities of practice” through leading research such in the Biodiversa project on safeguarding ecosystems and human rights through law and regulation. She has also experience designing multiactor dialogue processes and blended learning courses for judges, National Human Rights Institutions, environmental human rights defenders and United Nations staff. Her research expertise is complemented by her experiential learning by living in Sweden, Mexico, Kenya, Japan and Canada and the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon region.
Dr. Ituarte-Lima has analysed the interplay between laws at distinct geographical scales. Her research ranges from empirically-based case studies in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa, to legal analysis examining the interactions between international legal regimes in particular between the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and international human rights treaties. Her work has been published in English, Spanish, Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese.
She serves as regional deputy director for Latin America of the Global Network on Human Rights and Environment, acts as an expert advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment and was a member of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert group in policy support tools and methodologies.
Before working at RWI, she worked at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and she has held visiting status including at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at University of British Columbia in Canada, the Environmental Change Institute at University of Oxford in the UK, the Global Centre of Excellence Programme in Conflict Studies at Osaka University in Japan, the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador and ECOSUR in Mexico.
For further updates on her research, please refer to her Research profile:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claudia-Ituarte-Lima
https://portal.research.lu.se/en/persons/claudia-ituarte-lima