Dr Aiora Zabala is Assistant Professor at the Department of Land Economy and Director of the MSt Climate, Environmental and Urban Policy. Member of Clare Hall college. Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance. Editorial Board Member of the journal 'Ecological Economics'. Between 2017 and 2021 she was full-time Senior Editor at the journal 'Nature Sustainability', which she helped launch and where she assessed research manuscripts across the social sciences and wrote science communication pieces for broad audiences.

She is author of a popular science book on social-environmental sciences in her native language, and collaborates frequently with the media (printed newspaper opinions, live radio and TV), on environmental and sustainability policy topics.

Dr. Aiora Zabala joined the Department of Land Economy as Assistant Professor in 2024, after two years as Lecturer at the Open University, nearly five years as Senior Editor, and various posts held at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Economics from the University of Cambridge, an MSt in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy from the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, a Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Economics and Environmental Management and a BSc in Environmental Sciences, both from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has worked in the industry, on clean technology, environmental consultancy (on Local Agenda 21 and participatory processes) and online communication. She has lived, worked and researched in Spain, the UK, South Africa, Mexico and Indonesia.

She coordinates CEUP2 (Economics and Public Policy of Sustainability) and CEUP5 (Ecosystems and Biodiversity), and teaches in CEUP1 (Understanding Sustainability Transformations). 

She has taught environmental policy, economics and methods since 2013. She has coordinated EP02 (Environmental Economics and Policy) and Paper 5 (Environmental Economics and Law), taught in Paper 1 (Economics) and Paper 16 (Land, Food and Ecosystem Services), and PhD seminars about writing for publication. She has taught research methodologies at the Cambridge Research Methods (formerly SSRMC), at Geography and at Bioinformatics. Other topics taught have included R statistical language, multi-criteria decision approaches, modelling of ecosystem services, and data visualisation. She has been lecturer in economics, the environment and sustainability at the Open University and the University of Tokyo. She has also delivered workshops in Q methodology in Australia, Mexico and Brazil, among others, and taught ecosystem service modelling with the Basque Centre for Climate Change.

CEENRG

University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (UCCRI)