Claudia Ituarte-Lima

Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima 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). She is Leader of the Human Rights and Environment Thematic Area and Senior Researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She is also affiliated to the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Her work unites legal analysis and sustainability science for examining environmental and human rights governance challenges and innovative levers to address them. She is particularly interested in the transformation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements, in particular the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) into distinct governance forms at national and local level and examine whether they facilitate or frustrate ecosystems’ functioning and environmental justice.

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 CBD, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and international human rights treaties. She has also studied regional instruments in context such as the
impacts of European Timber Regulation on small-scale forest producers in developing countries.

She has published widely including international peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reports in the law, policy and practice interface targeting a wide audience. Her work has been published in English, Spanish, Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese. She acts as an expert advisor for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)and 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.

She has held visiting status at various academic institutions, including 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.