Marie Schellens works as an Environmental Security Analyst at UNEP's Disasters and Conflicts Branch. She coordinates the development of Strata, a data platform to identify, map and monitor environmental and climate stresses potentially driving threats to peace and security. It allows to streamline data on climate change, environment, peace and security in peacebuilders' and environmentalists' daily work, including to raise awareness of converging risks, to design and prioritise policy and programming responses, and to monitor and evaluate interventions.
Before joining UNEP, she finished a PhD as a Marie Curie fellow at Stockholm University and the University of Iceland, researching the role of natural resources in conflict risk, with qualitative and quantitative tools from the field of complex systems (2020). The PhD studies included a research placement with the Peace & Conflict research team at EC Joint Research Centre (JRC) to improve the Global Conflict Risk Index.
Before that, Marie worked with ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction at UNESCO. She received an MSc in Geography jointly from KU Leuven and Free University Brussels (Belgium, 2015).
