The environmental crisis in Venezuela: Diagnosis and solutions

Emilio Vilanova is a tropical forestry engineer, with a master’s degree in Forest Management from Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela where he worked between 2005 and 2013 fulfilling different roles in teaching and research. In 2019, he completed a Ph. .D in Environmental and Forest Sciences from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) of the University of Washington, USA. He has built hjis career within the framework of research and education on the topics of forest ecology and forest management. He is interested in facilitating the use of scientific knowledge for the practice of sustainable forest management. Between 2020 and October 2021, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar position in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at University of California – Berkeley working to understand the effects of drought on the dynamics of tree communities, fuels, and regeneration in the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada in California. Since November 2021, he is part of the Global Conservation Program at The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) focusing on the analysis of forest carbon within the Intact Forests Initiative.

Alejandro Álvarez is the General Coordinator of the Venezuelan organization Clima21 aimed at defending environmental human rights. He is a graduate in Biology and Doctor of Science Mention in Ecology (UCV). He is an environmentalist and a defender of environmental human rights. He is also a specialist in social management of the environment, with emphasis on issues related to climate change and biodiversity.

He has been professor at IESA, Universidad Metropolitana,  Universidad Pedagógica Libertador, Universidad de los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, Universidad Experimental de las Fuerzas Armadas, Universidad Simón Bolívar, and Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). Author or co-author of three books, two book chapters, five articles in scientific journals and more than thirty technical reports as author, co-author or editor. Special Mention in the 10th Edition of the Human Rights Award granted by the Embassy of Canada in Venezuela and the Centre for Peace and Human Rights "Padre Luis María Olaso" of the UCV, in March 2019.

Isaac Nahon-Serfaty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa. He is also a long-standing academic member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC).