Giulia Rubin joined GEDB as a research assistant in February 2024 and she works within the Biosphere Finance theme. Her current focus is to explore how anthropogenic actions drive cascading risks within complex social-ecological systems. She also focuses on improving the practices of financial actors within the finance-biodiversity nexus by facilitating the interaction between private stakeholders and scientists.
Giulia contributes to the Biosphere Finance theme by pivoting different disciplines of her transdisciplianry background - political science, diplomacy, climate communication, hydrology and wildfire studies. She anchors her conceptual reflections in the practical learnings emerging from her active engagement in youth climate delegations, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and youth assemblies working on community resilience through just social transitions.
Giulia holds an MSc in Climate Science from Wageningen University & Research, where she was familiarised with social-ecological systems thinking. For her dissertation she applied the theory to the study of out-of-ordinary wildfires driven by systematic mismanagement of Portuguese eucalyptus monocultures by the paper milling industries. Prior to that, she graduated from University College of Utrecht with a BA in Political science and Anthropology. Here she explored the controversies surrounding the public Commons and the inaccessibility of ‘LEED certified’ sustainable architecture in her hometown of Torino (Italy).
Overall, she searches for critical connections, causalities and sustainable governance strategies to render the transition into a new climatic regime less impactful for people and the Planet.