Assistant Professor in Political Ecologies of Sustainability, Utrecht University
Diana Vela Almeida is an assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainability, Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in natural resource science from McGill University. Diana has over ten years of experience in studies of the extractive industries in developing countries and has conducted extensive field research in Ecuador, Peru and Indonesia. She has written about resource geographies, conflict and development, participation in extractive governance and more recently, the role of the extractive industries in the energy transition. She led the policy report on the sustainability indicators for the metallic mining industries in the Andean countries prepared for the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC. Diana is also a senior researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology where she leads the project “Environmental Policy Instruments across Commodity Chains” in Indonesia, which aims to map the global value chains of nickel and tin that connect the multiple territories of extraction with the European market, and the synergies, tradeoffs and chokeholds of the their global governance systems. The results of this study aim to inform a policy report for the European Commission on the Proposal on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence.