Dr Cornelia Helmcke

Dr Cornelia Helmcke

Senior Policy Fellow

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2082
Email
ch348@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

I am a political ecologist investigating land use conflicts and environmental politics. I have a particular interest in those struggles associated with net-zero strategies, such as renewable electrification and ecosystem restoration.

Most recently, I have been conducting research with communities on the Scottish Islands to explore current restrictions to the central energy grid in delivering social and environmental benefits to the region, and potential solutions. This project has been supported by the Scottish Research Alliance for Energy, Homes and Livelihoods.

I have co-led the interdisciplinary research project “Community priorities in the creation of sustainable futures: an exploration of community-led decision making in peatland restoration projects in rural Scotland” which seeks to understand the potentials and challeneges for communities to make desicions reflecting own socio-economic but also ecological interests in the case of peatland restoration and carbon offsetting.

I have a track record of working with rural farming communities and researching their struggles for recognition as environmental-conscious actors with rights and responsibilities to their lands. This fascination has been sparked in Colombia where I collaborated with organisations addressing rural land conflicts since 2011. My recent book Engineering Reality: The politics of environmental impact assessments and future challenges of green energy development in Colombia discusses the role of the environmental impact assessment as a tool to legitimise controversial energy infrastructure and proposes the Energy Data Justice Framework to assess energy projects.

PhD supervision

  • Ewan Jenkins
  • Mengqi Peng

Selected publications

 

See more publications