Sandra Valencia has joined RWI to carry out research as part of the FORMAS financed (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) project titled ‘Environmental Human Rights Defenders – Change Agents at the Crossroads of Climate change, Biodiversity and Cultural Conservation’. The project aims to analyse the main motivations, goals, underlying discourses, practices and strategies that drive Environmental Human Rights Defenders (EHRD) and their understandings of the crises they seek to address. In addition, the project will analyse the impacts of these practices in terms of successes and obstacles, including trade-offs between different goals as well as the vulnerability and risks faced by EHRD and the social groups they claim to represent. Finally, the project will propose lessons learned and recommendations for policies and practices that support EHRD and their work on the protection of cultural heritage and biodiversity and climate change. The project will draw on case studies in Colombia.
Sandra has an interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Sustainability Science from Lund University, a B.S. in Physics from Kennesaw State University (former Southern Polytechnic State University) in the USA and a MSc. in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her PhD thesis explored the socio-environmental vulnerability of low-income inhabitants in peri-urban areas in Colombia. Prior to her PhD, she worked for several years on climate change adaptation projects in the Latin American and Caribbean region at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC. Before the IDB, she worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a research scientist for the Micro-pulse Lidar Network (MPLNET) project, working with the collection and analysis of aerosol and cloud data.
During her postdoctoral research, she worked with city governments in seven cities across four continents on the integration of Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into urban development plans. She also worked on a research project called Greengovlooking at city leadership and co-creational strategies to reduce the city’s carbon footprint and increase its resilience, with case studies in Cape Town, Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Oslo.
In the past few years, she has also been working on the interlinkages between environment and conflict/peacebuilding. She recently completed research in the Sumapaz region of Colombia as part of the Formas-financed project the Nature of Peace, which looked at the interrelation between social and environmental outcomes in Colombia and Uganda in the peacebuilding period. Related to that topic, she also did a research consultancy for the World Food Programme as part of a partnership between SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and WFP, analyzing the linkages between climate change, food security and conflict in the Honduran and Guatemalan Dry Corridor.
In addition to her research role at RWI, Sandra works as a freelance consultant focusing on climate change policy and practice in the Global South. She has done multiple analyses for international organizations, such as the Inter-American Development Bank, looking at gaps and opportunities for integrating climate change adaptation, disaster risk management and environmental sustainability in countries including Belize and Panama.