Rebecca Froese is a PhD candidate at the department of Environmental Sciences and the Research Group Landuse Conflicts at University of Koblenz-Landau. There she works in the project PRODIGY (Process-based & Resilience-Oriented management of DIversity Generates sustainability) which aims to analyze possible tipping points in biodiversity, land use and social systems in the upper Amazon Basin of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.

Rebecca specialized in human-environmental interactions, climate and environmental change, governance and sustainable development. Currently she pursues a comparative governance analysis in the environmental sector and an analysis of the land use conflicts at the triple boarder of Brazil, Bolivia and Peru. Rebecca is also a research fellow at the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate, where she is engaged in the research area “Environmental and Resource Conflicts” on the nexus of climate change, land use and conflicts. In addition, she is an associate fellow at the Research Group Climate Change and Security at University of Hamburg.

She holds a Master Degree in Integrated Climate System Sciences from the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP (Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction) at Hamburg University. In her master thesis she developed a framework for climate-proofing development cooperation. Already during her Master, she started working as a consultant at GFA Consulting Group in Hamburg, focusing on the topics of sustainable cities, climate change adaptation and land-use issues in Brazil. Through this engagement, she developed a research project on the roles and functions of academic networks in governance processes for climate resilient urban development in Latin America and in particular in Ecuador. The aim of the project is to investigate how societal transformations as responses to climate and environmental change as well as rapid urbanization in this specific context are framed and governed and which scales of governance would be suitable.

Rebecca obtained her Bachelor in Geoscience at University of Bremen, Germany and at University of Victoria, Canada before working as an intern in a project of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) on prevention, control and monitoring of bushfires in the Brazilian savannah (Cerrado).