Elizabeth Noemí Díaz General

Elizabeth Díaz General holds a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering with specialisation in Geography (USACH, Chile), a M.Sc. in Global Change Management (HNEE, Germany), and a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences: Protection and Management of Natural Resources (UNIBO, Italy).

She works in the Land Use Change & Climate Research Group since November 2021, where she developed the Quality of Life framework from a Land System Science perspective. Since September 2022, Elizabeth works as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “BIONEXT – The Biodiversity Nexus: transformative change for sustainability”, where she contributes with her quality of life work to CRAFTY-Europe and participates in the work packages 1 (the biodiversity nexus), 2 (triggering transformative change), and 4 (knowledge and science brokerage for IPBES assessments and EU policy).

Elizabeth has previously worked as an assistant professor and lecturer in the fields of physical geography (particularly hydrogeology), geoinformatics, multicriteria evaluation, and data analysis at universities in Chile. She has also worked in Strategic Environmental Assessment, incorporating sustainability considerations into land-use planning decision making and public policies, both as a public employee of the Ministry of Environment of Chile and as an independent consultant, leading environmental teams and participatory processes with local communities and Chilean governmental institutions.

Research interests:

Global change, land use and land cover change, land-use management, social behaviour, socio-ecological systems, agent-based models, spatial analysis, sustainability, dietary choices, water and food security, spatial planning, and the global south.

Elizabeth is particularly interested in studying the interactions of socio-ecological systems and the consequences of local and global dietary choices on sustainability under global change conditions, through spatially explicit models that incorporate human behaviour, to support decision-making processes and promote sustainable and ethical changes in the society.