These researchers and policymakers from the Joint Research Centre and the wider European Commission participated to the Resonances IV Summer School (June 2022).
They discussed, debated and challenged their views, exploring the topic of NaturArchy and engaging with the Artists.
Michele d'Addetta
Michele has been working in policy analysis and development and project management in the areas of culture and education, human rights and democracy for several international organisations (Council of Europe, UNESCO, European Union). He is currently policy analyst at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. He has been collaborating with universities and research institutes – such as the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the University of Technology of Sydney - on research projects on international law of cultural heritage, the relationships between culture and human rights and the role of culture in international relations. He is currently PhD candidate at the University of Geneva with a thesis on the intersections between cultural heritage and human rights. Michele has also been working with several NGOs active in the field of cultural cooperation and he is of the founders of HAPE Collective, a platform of djs and musicians that promotes barriers-breaking musical encounters.
Alan Belward
Alan Belward works at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy where he is Acting Director and head of the Food Security Unit in the Directorate for Sustainable Resources. Alan has served on numerous inter- national science panels including the Global Climate Ob- serving System, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 Mission Advisory Group and the NASA and USGS’ Landsat Science Team. He has a BSc in Plant Biology from New- castle University, as well as MPhil and PhD degrees from Cranfield University’s School of Agriculture Food and Environment and is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society of Biology.
Alba Bernini
Alba began working at the Joint Research Centre in Ispra in April 2021. She develops mathematical models that simulate the spread of infectious diseases in groups of people. She is currently working on a project called IMPARA that aims to learn from the Covid-19 experience. The goal of the research is to identify the best strategies put in place by different countries, namely those that were able to contain the pandemic with limited impacts on society and economy. She holds a master’s degree in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering and a PhD in Information Technology.
Anna Berti Suman
Anna Berti Suman is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the European Commission Joint Research Centre. She is principal researcher of the project „Sensing for Justice“ aimed at studying the potential of civic monitoring as a source of evidence for environmental litigation and as a tool to foster environmental mediation. SensJus also explores intersections of art and scientific inquiry. Beyond research, Anna is also a passionate environmental lawyer, being Qualified Barrister under the Bar of Rome and following cases at ‘Systasis - Study Centre for the Prevention and Management of Environmental Conflicts’, Milan. Anna obtained her PhD from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, The Netherlands, which included fieldwork in Fukushima, Japan, on civic monitoring of nuclear radiations. Anna has work and research experience in health law and technology (UK), in environmental litigation (in the Ecuadorean Amazon Rainforest) and water law (working on water conflicts in Chile).
Danijela Brkovic
Hello! My name is Danijela Brkovic and I am currently working at the European Commission, DG of International Partnerships focusing on sustainable development and policy in partnership with the United Nations and the World Bank as part of my degree requirements. I am originally from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada where I am finis- hing my degrees in Political Science with a concentration in European Studies and Social Justice Studies. I also have a diploma in Public Relations, which I hope to one-day use towards informing people about responsible and sustainable technologies and policies for our shared future. Having the opportunity to exchange ideas and create new narratives to help spread the message of the EU Green Deal is something the world needs more of. It is a great pleasure to be spending my summer in Europe and here in Italy for the next week with all of you. I am happy to be a part of this shared learning experience and excited to see what it may bring.
Caterina Cacciatori
I am Caterina. I have joined the Water and Marine Resources unit at JRC Ispra past July. In the water quality laboratory, I support the citizens engagement project “The gems of water”, which belongs to the work of the Social Engagement Platform of the World Water Quality Alliance. The project aims at linking an advanced method of water quality monitoring to citizens of local communities around the world. Trained as Environmental Engineer and researcher in water treatment at the University of Tokyo, I went on to study a Master at the University for Peace in Costa Rica, where I focused on the complex relationship bet- ween sustainable development, natural resources and peace. Working on “The gems of water” project, I really found the path I want to walk in the future: I am convinced that interdisciplinarity is essential if we want to solve the issues we are facing today!
Instagram: @aaguacaate
Michele Ceddia (aka Graziano)
Graziano Ceddia is a social scientist with a background in applied environmental economics and political economy. He has been working on a range of topics at the interface between social and environmental sciences, with a strong focus on agricultural expansion and deforestation in the Global South. Between 2016 and 2021 he has been leading a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) studying the impact of governance structures and indigenous peoples land rights on deforestation in the Chaco Salteño (Argentina). He has worked at different universities across Europe. He is currently working as a scientific research officer at the European Commission‘s Joint Research Centre on issues related to the social and environmental impact of agriculture, with a special focus on the role of agroecology.
Twitter: @ GrazianoCeddia
Céline Charvériat
Former IEEP Director (Institute for European Environmental Policy)
Céline Charveriat is a renowned research activist and experienced civil society leader. Céline started her career as a researcher at the Peterson Institute and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C., focusing on poverty, social protection, and natural disasters. Céline then worked for 10 years at Oxfam International, first as a researcher on poverty and international commodity markets, then as an advocate on trade and climate change issues. As campaigns director, she conducted Oxfam’s campaigns on inequality, climate change, gender and humanitarian crises and conflict. She was the Executive Director of the Institute of European Environmental Policy (IEEP) from 2016 to 2022, during which time she created the first pan European network of sustainability think tanks Think Sustainable Europe (TSE) and the multistakeholder platform Think2030. During that time, she also served as the Chair of the Board of the Climate Action Network Europe. Celine is currently one of the Vice Chairs of the European Commission’s high-level expert group ESIR (Economic and Social Impacts of Innovation and Research). She belongs to the council of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and is on the board of Climate Catalyst. She also works as a coach and mentor for younger female civil society leaders and is one of the founding members of civil society collectives, such as End Ecocide Belgium and Mères au front Belgique.
Watch a recording of the talk given by Cèline at JRC on the topic of NaturArchy, November 2021.
Sandra Coecke
Dr. Sandra Coecke, senior scientist at EC JRC has a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-based education from the Free University of Brussels followed by PhD degree at the Free University of Brussels, Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy. She has been managing and leading scientific teams since the 90’ies first in pharmaceutical industry and later joining the EC JRC. She has more than 30 years‘ experience in alternative toxicity methods. In 1994 she was already awarded the International Prize from the Foundation for the Substitution of Animal Experimentation and in 2020 was the recipient of the Björn Ekwall Memorial Award (BEMA) for the development and validation of new in vitro cell and tissue-based methods based on good in vitro method practices. She has established and managed the European Union Network of Laboratories for the Validation of Alternative Methods (EU- NETVAL), which includes 35 high quality laboratories across Europe. At the EC JRC she currently acts as a multi-stakeholder horizontal team leader for Farm to Fork (Feed & Food) models and methods for One Health. She published over 100 peer scientific publications and book chapters and lectured around the globe and published recently a major EC JRC study exploring how by using new innovati- ve technologies based on human biology cell and tissue and mathematics-based methods better understand the Covid19 disease.
Twitter: @SandraCoecke
Frank Dentener
Frank Dentener works since 30 years in the field climate change, agriculture and atmospheric pollution. Frank is senior expert and group leader at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. He completed a Ph.D. in Physics with Nobel prize-laureate Paul Crutzen at Utrecht University. He is member of the scientific advisory board of the JPI FACCE, and co-chair of WMO’s Scientific Advisory Group on near-real-time applications, member of the WMO Model Measurement Fusion initiative, and he has served on a variety of international commissions. He has (co-) authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and 4 IPCC reports, Hirsch factor 96, and is a Clarivatehighlycitedscientistsince2015.Frankheldassistant professorships at Wageningen and Utrecht University, the Nettherlands, PrivatDozent at the ETH in Switserland, and currently affiliated with the Politechnical University of Torino. He supervised and examined ca. 10 Ph.D. and Habilitation candidates. Frank is an expert in atmospheric chemistry land interactions, including ozone impacts on agricultural production systems, and climate change and mitigation and adaptation.
Luca De Felice
Luca De Felice is a geo-spatial data scientist. Since 2018, he joined the EC’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) D6 Unit – Knowledge for Sustainable Development & Food Security - where he is responsible for the development and update of the Global Surface Water Explorer (GSWE). He is also responsible for managing the JRC’s close collaboration with UNEP in designing and developing the indicators and the interface of UNEP’s new Freshwater Ecosystem Explorer, which helps monitor progress towards SDG 6.6.1 (Change in the extent of water-related ecosystems over time).
Andrea Diaz Rincon
Andrea Diaz is a researcher in the fields of transport and energy economics. With her double background in electrical engineering (National University of Colombia, 2003) and a PhD in economics (KU Leuven, 2015), she has worked at the intersection of both areas in different private and public institutions. In her current position at the JRC, she is entering into a new dimension studying energy systems through the lenses of complex system analysis.
Grégoire Dubois
Grégoire Dubois is a Belgian zoologist and a radiobiologist (Free University of Brussels) with a PhD in geostatistics (University of Lausanne). He has been working for more than 20 years for the European Commission‘s in house science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC). The first half of his career was about monitoring radioactivity in the environment, before working on biodiversity conservation, with a focus on developing countries. He currently leads at JRC the portfolio of activities dealing with biodiversity and ecosystem services and more recently the new Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) of the European Commission launched in October 2019. He also regularly supports the European Union in its work with the Convention on Biological Diversity and IPBES. Grégoire is also a member of the IPBES task force on data and knowledge.
When not working, you will find him laying somewhere in the mud under heavy photographic equipment in search of various critters.
Twitter: @ GregoireDubois
Eimear Farrell
Policy leader and entrepreneur working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, law and public policy. Most recently, I led on the development of Ireland‘s National Strategy for AI and served as Head of Delegation to the Council of Europe Ad-Hoc Committee on AI. Other areas of expertise/interest include: international human rights and equalities; responsible and inclusive innovation; digital economy & society; ‘connected’ and creative cities; business human rights; public health; SDGs; role of religion in society. I offer a global perspective with experience of shaping and influencing agendas within international organisations, Government, civil society and the private sector.
I am excited by the potential to effect positive change through participatory politics and the democratisation of technology - let‘s use our collective intelligence to create a code that cares!
I am committed to connecting communities of interest and purpose in order to catalyse impact. I want to do meaningful things that matter for our common humanity. How can we create a human chain, expand the space for an ethical imagination and bring people together in circles of shared solidarity?
Twitter: @eimearfarrell
Guillermo García-Sánchez
Guillermo García-Sánchez is a Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas (ICMAT) in the Applied Mathematics department, where he works for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Group. His work addresses the development of novel dynamical systems tools and computational techniques for providing new insights into geophysical flows and met/ ocean modelling. Currently, He is working on the real-time application of these ideas to address critical environ- mental challenges like marine litter pollution and oil spills. He is also co-founder of the startup Digital Earth Solutions, which aims to keep clean the oceans through mathematical modelization.
Twitter: @GGSGuillermo
Bernd Gawlik
Dr. Bernd Manfred Gawlik is Portfolio Leader at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and is closely involved in the EU Water Policies, where he provides scientific support. Bernd, who closely interacts with all actors around “water”, has contributed to more than 100 publications. In collaborations with UNEP, the Union for the Mediterranean and other supra-national organisations his work is at the core of social engagement activities and applied sustainability diplomacy, promoted through the so-called RENAISSANCE Concept. The innovative concept employs also the co-design stemming from interactions between scientists and artists, thus facilitating an all society engagement around the complex subject of sustainability.
Giacomo Grassi
Giacomo works on forests and climate change, in the interface between science and policy. He leads scientific analyses to understand how much CO2 is emitted or absorbed by forests, works with countries to prepare greenhouse gas inventories for the United Nations, and supports EU policymakers in designing forest strategies to fight climate change. He is an author of various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and follows the negotiations under the Paris Agreement.
Irene Guerrero Fernández
I am a Spanish PhD Ecologist with focus on Farmland Biodiversity. My research career has developed on the interaction of human activity and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. This relation is central, as the functioning of agro-ecosystems, their capacity to provide, depends very much on their ecological integrity. As crucial to communities, this interaction between food production and nature is very much shaped by policy. Thus, inevitably I have become increasingly involved in supporting policy-making. I have worked most of my time in Academia, teaching ecology and plant biology in university programmes of agricultural science. Yet, my path towards agricultural policy has led me to my current position as a project officer in the D5 unit of the JRC here in Ispra.
Isabelle Hupont Torres
Isabelle is a PhD researcher on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with 15+ years of experience in the field. She has worked at institutions of different nature: purely academic (Affective Lab - University of Zaragoza; Sorbonne University, Paris), technological centres (Aragon Institute of Technology; Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, France), and private sector (Herta). Her research interests are affective computing, facial analysis and human-machine interaction. She is currently a scientific officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (HUMAINT team), exploring the policy side of AI and contributing to establish the path towards ethical AI in the European Union.>
Lucía Iglesias Blanco
Lucía Iglesias, Forestry Engineer inspired and specialised in protected areas management by working in National Parks Network in Spain for 15 years, moved to Brussels in 2019, to work on the implementation of nature conservation policy (Habitats and Birds Directives). She is also involved in promoting the EU Natura 2000 network or protected areas and its achievements through the Natura 2000 Award scheme, or the use of the Natura 2000 logo in goods and services. However, the challenges related to the implementation of the nature conservation directives at national level are occupying most of the daily work. When she is not working, she likes illustration and photography, and she enjoys dancing, playing and listening to music.
Julian Keimer
Julian Keimer is a researcher and knowledge manager at the European Commission Joint Research Centre. He co- authored the recent report "Values and identities - a policymaker‘s guide“ summarising how personal values and identities influence our political beliefs and perception. Within the same project Julian develops tools for policy-makers to understand values better and take them into account when designing policy. His second major work strand is improving competence of policymakers to work with scientific and other evidence. Beyond his work, Julian likes to go running, bouldering, debating, and out for dinner. He is a philosopher, political scientist, and physicist by training, which allowed him to work in photovoltaics, comparative political science, counter-terrorism and citizen engagement before joining his current team.
Maciej Krystofowicz
Policy Analyst – Foresight.
An economist by training and civil servant by vocation – Maciek is by nature curious. He joined the EU policy lab in 2016 attracted by the opportunity to work on innovative approaches to formulating public policies (being a co-author of a few regulations) and strategic foresight (being slightly short-sighted). Before that, since 2006, he was tirelessly reforming the Common Agricultural Policy. Even before, he was a part of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, supporting Poland’s accession and first years in the European Union.
Twitter: @maciek_ka
Jonah Lynch
Since childhood, I have tried to live up to the ideal of the “renaissance man”: competent in many fields, endlessly curious. My search for knowledge about origins and destinies led me first to study Physics, then Philosophy and Theology, and now History. Along with humanistic interests, I have always been interested in technology. I am excited to dedicate my wide-ranging skills and experiences to exploring intelligence and improving research and education.
Ana Montero Castaño
I am a PhD ecologist interested in pollinators and pollination interactions. Along my research career, I have studied different threats that pollinators face: biological invasions, pathogen spread, habitat loss or the use of pesticides. In particular, I try to understand the underlying mechanisms and the characteristics of the species and the environment that influence the response of pollinator communities to these threats. In this regard, I find agricultural areas especially interesting study systems as they represent many of those threats to pollinators, while they can highly depend on their pollination service. Contributing to a more sustainable agriculture is the final goal of my work at the JRC - Food Security Unit. Before joining the JRC, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Canada), where I moved after conducting my PhD at Doñana Biological Station (Spain).
Amanda Jane Ozin-Hofsaess
Amanda Jane OZIN-HOFSAESS is a mobile Microbiologist and Molecular Geneticist. Following a long scientific career, she became a Senior Expert for the European Centre of Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) where she used scientific, strategic and coordination skills to boost public health microbiology capacities in the EU to be ready for health threats whether bird flu, ebola or now with the COVID19 pandemic. Currently, she is a Research Programme Administrator at the European Research Executive Agency (REA) using a mix of scientific, creative, communication, interpersonal and project management skills to reach programmatic goals of the Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Amanda Jane promotes the use of Art-Science Competitions to attract the interest of young people to play with their sense of curiosity, creativity and the drive to innovate.
Instagram: @artlovescience
Twitter: @amanda_ozin @REA_research @MSCActions
Ivan Penov
Ivan Penov is a musician and sound artist whose artworks are inspired by natural and rural contexts and distinguish themselves for featuring unusual sounds of musical instruments and field recordings. His productions range from sound installations and acousmatic compositions to audiovisual works where images are treated as poetic and sensorial extensions of sound. Across the diverse media, the “gestures” of both sound and video are often inspired by material and ecological processes, be it the vibration of a bow or the fermentation of yeasts. His works were showcased at ICMC (Ljubljana), STEIM (Amsterdam), Sonorities (Belfast), Musiques et Recherches (Bruxelles), Estonian Music Days, VAEFF (New York) and, Membranes Out Of Order (Berlin) among others.
Jessica Ponti
Dr. Jessica Ponti, scientist at European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy, has education in Biology, from University of Insubria (Italy) and genetics, from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). She obtained PhD in Science at the Facultés Univeritaires Notre-Dame de la Paix-Namur (Belgium). She has more than 20 years of experience in in vitro testing of chemicals and nanomaterials, investigating cytotoxicity, morphological neoplastic transformation, genotoxicity, and being involved in different activities. She is now responsible of the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) and Cryo-TEM facility. She mainly works on physicochemical characterisation of nanomaterials – nanoplastics, their detection in complex matrices and interaction with biological systems.
Antonio Puertas Gallardo
I am working at the European Commission since 2003 as IT Project Assistant, I have engineering studies as main back-ground, and today I am mostly interested on the subjects of Health and inequalities like universal access to health- care systems. Today I am working with Machine Learning algorithms and their impact on Medicine, like the incoming automated medicine services, the future of the Microbiome research and the “AI doctors”.
I will also host at the JRC Science summit 2022 an event called “Consciousness: The dawn of Machine awareness” so I am truly interested on what is going to happen when machines will be aware. AI is making very fast achievements on this field.I have also some expertise on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and automated speech recognition (ASR) systems. I have been working the last 8 years with a group of molecular biologists at the JRC analysing genomic data, in the last 2 years my research mainly focused on the SARS-CoV-2 genome new variants prediction.
Elahe Rajabiani
Elahe is a designer at the EU Policy lab. She uses design tools and methods to help scientists and policy makers tackle complex systemic issues in a more creative and collaborative way. Before joining the EU commission, Elahe was the creative lead at the Open Innovation Centre of the University of Bologna. She designed international programs that brought together the academia and the industry. She led multidisciplinary and cross-generational teams and applied design to develop new ideas in various sectors such as pharma, food, automotive and entertainment. She was also a design educator and coach for student programs at the Design Factory Global Network and the Challenge Based Innovation at CERN IdeaSquare. She is passionate about speculative design but her interest is in Design in all its forms and functions. She believes in the visual, tangible, optimistic and proactive spirit of design to give a better form to the future.
Marisa Sarria Pereira De Passos
Marisa Sarria Pereira de Passos joined JRC.S.4 Innovation in Science and Policy Making Unit in 2021 as a CA focusing on nanoplastics bioaccumulation and biotechnological detection methods development (Centre of Advanced Studies, CAS6). She is a ERT toxicologist since 2021 and joined the Association of European Toxicologists and Toxicological Societies in 2018, and the Portuguese Toxicology Association in 2020. Current research lines of interest encompass from a better understanding of the health impacts associated to nanosize particles/materials (including plastics) and persistent pollutants exposure to environmental risk assessment methodologies; and contribution to the health-relevant aims of the European Strategy (for Plastics) in a Circular Economy and of the Bioeconomy Strategy by privileging in vitro toxicity methods development towards a paradigm shift prioritizing innovative and robust alternative strategies to animal testing.
Nikolaos Stilianakis
Nikolaos (Niko) Stilianakis is a mathematical epidemiologist at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biomathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research interests are infectious disease epidemiology, modelling immune system-pathogen interactions, and environmental health. With the artists Maria Rebecca Ballestra and Tomasz (Prasqual) Praszczalek he participated in the exhibitions of the Resonances III Festival (DATAMI) in 2019, a Science and Art programme of the JRC. In 2019 he was also invited speaker in the 4th Festival for the Earth in Monte Carlo curated by artist Maria Rebecca Ballestra under the auspices of the HRH Prince Albert II of Monaco.
Giorgio Tessadri
I work in the New European Bauhaus team – in Brussels - as communication and event coordinator. Currently in charge of the NEB Festival (9-12 June). As night falls, I work on my artistic projects. My educational background is in international relations and fine arts.
Mateusz Tokarski
Mateusz Tokarski is a policy analyst at the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy, working on citizen engagement projects addressing environmental issues. He has background in media studies, semiotics and philosophy. He did his PhD on ethical aspects of biodiversity conflicts, with a particular focus on meanings people attach to discomforting encounters with wildlife.
Andrea Valsesia
Andrea is a Project Assistant at the JRC in Ispra and holds a PhD in Physics on Nanofabrication of surfaces for biological application. He has been working in the field of nano-micro fabrication, thin films deposition, surface analysis and integration of devices, development of high-tech laboratory equipment, characterization of engineered nanomaterials. His research has been always oriented toward development of methods and experimental tools to support EU regulation in particular in the nanotechnology domain. He was the founder of the spin-off company generated from the Technology Transfer project (Plasmore SRL) and CEO of the company for 5 years. Recently, his research is devoted to the development of analytical methods for the detection, quantification and identification of nanoplastics in complex matrices and in the environment. He started the project at JRC as a Proof-of-Concept in 2018 and he continued to work as a Visiting Scientist in the United States at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Currently, JRC and NIST are closely collaborating in the field of nanoplastics detection and in the development of nanoplastics standards.
Saskia Vermeylen
Saskia Vermeylen is a reader in law and property scholar at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work on Indigenous Peoples’ cultural property is informed by legal anthropology and she has done multi-site ethnography across 6 different language groups in Southern Africa. Her empirical work has also informed her research interest in property and ethics through a phenomenological reading of the work of Levinas and Derrida which she has brought into conversation with postcolonial literary studies. The latter has also inspired her interest in the extension of ‘colonial’ property frontiers into outer space and the deep seabed. This research is embedded in Afrofuturism, ecocriticism, and science fiction. More recently, her legal practice also includes visual and performative art as a methodological legal enquiry, including curating. Finally, her work also engages with the material aspect of property, which she examines through feminist posthumanism, eco-philosophy, and speculative philosophy.
Diana Vieira
Diana Vieira is an Environmental Engineer with a special focus on soil erosion risk. She dedicated most of her time monitoring burned areas and understanding the underlying key-processes in fire-affected soils and landscapes to better adapt models to burned conditions. Over the past years she applied several hydrological models to recently burned areas and improved them in order to take into account post-fire mitigation and rehabilitation measures. She successfully included the effect of soil water repellency and post-fire forest management actions in her soil erosion predictions, and leaded the project that created a post-fire soil erosion risk map for Portugal. Diana is also dedicated to knowledge transference and strongly believes that art and technology should go hand in hand, and is a fervent advocate for equity and diversity. Her publication record includes several works at global scale, which aim to find land management solutions for post-fire on-site and off-site effects.
Matteo Vizzarri
I deal with deeper understanding the role of forests and forest management for climate change mitigation. The way we manage our forests is crucial for maintaining the carbon trapped in trees, roots, soil, deadwood, litter and wood products. The atmosphere sees these carbon losses and we feel better. Science produces evidence but is often not enough. People need to feel as part of the story and help maintain forests and the whole biosphere healthy, biodiverse and resilient. Arts can therefore mutually interact with science to directly permeate the people consciousness and help forests fight climate change.
Marina Xenophontos
Marina Xenophontos, Ecological Scientist inspired and specialise in the implementation of the Nature Directives (Birds and Habitats Directives), the establishment of site-specific conservation objectives and conservation measures, the monitoring and reporting for habitats and species, and management of the protected areas by working in Department of Environment in Cyprus for 15 years, moved to Brussels in 2022, to work on the implementation of nature conservation policy (Habitats and Birds Directives). She is also involved in Reporting, the Water Resilience Policy, and the Climate Changes Strategy, in regard to the EU Natura 2000 network or protected areas and. However, the challenges related to the implementation of the nature conservation directives at national level are occupying most of the daily work, she likes exploring nature, walking, and she enjoys cinema, musicals, and concerts.