Paola Villavicencio Calzadilla is a Bolivian academic lawyer, specialized in and passionate about the socio-legal issues surrounding the climate and environmental crises. She holds a Bachelor in Law from the Universidad Salesiana de Bolivia, a Master degree in Environmental Law and a PhD in Law, specialized in International Climate Change Law, both from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Spain. Upon completion of her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Unit “Law, Justice and Sustainability” of the North-West University in South Africa and at the Faculty of Law of the URV in Spain.
Over the course of her career, Paola has been involved in several research projects and has collaborated with various research centers focused on the study of environmental and climate change law, including the IUCN Environmental Law Centre – ELC (Germany) and the Groningen Centre of Energy Law and Sustainability of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She also worked as an attorney for public and private institutions and supported grassroots organizations and NGOs from Bolivia, Ecuador, Spain and the Netherlands.
She is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law (WCEL), the Red Académica sobre Cambio Climático, Energía y Derechos Humanos (RICEDH), the United Nations Knowledge Network Harmony with Nature and the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Her main areas of interest include climate change law and human rights, climate justice and energy justice, climate litigation, SDGs and the ecocentric/Rights of Nature paradigm in times of climate emergency. She also has a keen interest in climate change education and communication. She has authored and co-authored several academic and non-academic publications on these topics and has presented her work at numerous conferences in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Currently, she is an Associate Researcher at the Tarragona Centre for Environmental Law Studies (CEDAT) of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) and an Extraordinary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law of the North-West University (South Africa).