Francesco is a member of the Center for Climate Change, Energy and Environmental Law, where he is currently pursuing his PhD on the legal feasibility of implementing urban Nature-based Solutions across European cities. The main research areas addressed by his project are conservation of urban biodiversity and improvement of climate change adaptation. The latter is examined through the lens of heat and flood management in urban areas. Francesco is interested in analysing the main legal challenges that hinder Nature-based Solutions implementation and scaling-up within the European Union.

The economy and the environment are fundamental elements of sustainable Finnish, European and indeed global futures. The EU continues to strive towards a more competitive economy, while it at the same time faces enormous environmental challenges in many areas from resource use to biodiversity and climate change. Moreover, these environmental and economic challenges are tightly intertwined. The search for increasing global welfare needs to take place within the limited boundaries of the natural resources available today and for the generations to come. This challenge promises on the other hand also opportunities for those that are the most advanced in “greening their economies”.

These societal challenges and opportunities are at the core my professorship on the “circular economy” and the EU and international economic law. The societal objectives and the support for achieving them takes to a notable extent place in the laws and policies that govern the fast evolving environmental and economic sectors, and their interactions in Finland, the EU and beyond. The objective of my professorship is to deliver theoretically advanced, policy relevant research and education on this environment-economy nexus, focusing on the circular economy, sustainable trade agreements and green public procurement.

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Climate crisis and religious change in sub-Saharan Africa funded by Kone Foundation. My research focus is in northeastern Madagascar where conserved tropical forest area with exceptional biodiversity diminishes and people do not get as good harvests as they have gotten before because of a too intensive cultivation cycle or too little rain. In this context Christian churches have promoted projects restraining climate change. In my sub-project I focus on the Tsimihety rice and vanilla farmers and how they perceive environmental and development projects of the churches that can conflict for example with practices reproducing Tsimihety social organisation.

In my research as a human geographer I explore the interface between society and nature. I investigate the ways local communities in both urban and rural surroundings come to terms with the transforming spaces and environments, which includes research into the politics of conservation of biodiversity. Often focussing on the local scale as a lens through which to examine broader societal and political transformations, there is a crucial multi-scalar dimension in my research.

Moritz Petersmann is a doctoral researcher at the Center for Climate Change, Energy and Environmental Law. His research focuses on independent international science-policy interfaces, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). He is particularly interested in their role and capacities to govern modern wicked problems.

At the UEF Law School, Moritz is working as study coordinator for the Joint Nordic Master Programme in Environmental Law (NOMPEL). The programme is a cooperation between the University of Uppsala (Uppsala, Sweden), the Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø, Norway) and the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland).