Claudia
Parra Paitan
PhD Researcher
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
Claudia Parra is a PhD researcher in the Environmental Geography group of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). She conducts research about environmental and socioeconomic telecoupling impacts of agricultural commodities from the land use change perspective. Her work is part of the MSCA-EU COUPLED project (coupled-itn.eu) and she works under the supervision of Prof. Peter Verburg (VU Amsterdam) and Prof. Peter Messerli from the University of Bern. After four years working with development projects focused on sustainable land use management and climate change adaptation in her home country (Peru), she decided to do a MSc. in Human Ecology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) to deepen her understanding about socio-ecological systems. As part of her Master’s thesis, she conducted an ex-post impact assessment of an UNDP agricultural development project focused on sustainable land management, which sparked her interest in the complex telecoupled interactions between global and local systems. Her main interests are sustainability assessment, land use science and modeling of socio-ecological systems.