Ángela María Amaya Arias

Professor and Researcher
Universidad Externado de Colombia
Colombia

Jul 3, 2018

Angela María Amaya Arias is a lawyer, researcher, and professor, focusing on environmental law and sustainable development. After training as a lawyer at the Universidad Externado de Colombia, she received both an LL.M. with an emphasis on Water, Environment, and Natural Resources, and a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Zaragoza in Spain. Her thesis, entitled “El Principio de No Regresión en el Derecho Ambiental” (The Non Regression Principle in Environmental Law), was named the Best Environmental Law Thesis in Spain in 2015. More recently, she has been teaching courses on environmental law, forest law, and research methodology in the Environmental Law Department at the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and works as an independent consultant on issues relating to biodiversity and sustainable development. 

Her research has focused primarily on the legal framework for forests and sustainable peacebuilding, and the ways in which forests can be sources of peacebuilding and risk protection for local communities. She has investigated how tools within the Colombian legal system can be used to protect forests, community rights, and biodiversity by strengthening community governance. She has also examined how the idea behind “Bosques de Paz” (forests of peace), an initiative that plants a tree for each victim of armed conflict in Colombia, can be expanded to involve the environment more widely in both local and national peace efforts. This research grew out of Angela’s passion for the specific geography of Colombia—a country characterized by rich forests—and how proper management of forest resources can help with sustainable environmental peacebuilding. Her work in Colombia has also been influenced by the ways in which practitioners in other countries have utilized the connection between environmental law and peace to improve post-conflict regulation and peacebuilding.

Her research has now evolved to encompass how new technologies and trends of management are changing the law. For future research, she is particularly interested in how collaborative technologies are changing the way that we make legal decisions, and how environmental law could use these new technologies to improve the governance of natural resources. For example, Angela notes that “new technologies could help to detect illegal logging operations and illegal timber sales, supplementing underfunded existing efforts.” This new field of research complements previous work on forests and sustainable peacebuilding, and she hopes to continue investigating this topic while also expanding her knowledge of different environmental law systems across the globe.

Through her investigation of environmental legal structures, Angela’s work and career have spanned spatial and disciplinary boundaries. Angela speaks of the Association as a place to further these connections by opening networks and getting to know people from different countries and disciplines. This relationship began at the Nature of Peace conference in Lund in April 2018: “Going to the Nature of Peace conference and meeting people from the Association was eye-opening across disciplines ... Academic work can be lonely, and we should be working in networks. When I learned about the Association and community of environmental peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, I thought it was a great opportunity to learn, share my work, and expand my perspective.”