Climate change, territories, diversity

Group coordinator

Massimo De Marchi, PhD, professor of "Environmental Assessment and Evaluation" and "Environmental policies and ecological economics", full professor of geography at the Department of Civil Environmental and Architectural Engineering. It deals with GIScience and participatory processes and management of environmental conflicts in complex territories with high biological and cultural diversity, just fossil fuel transition. He worked as a researcher and consultant in Italy, in Europe, Africa, Latin America. Passionate about the Amazon since 1988. Vem, vamos embora que esperar embora não é saber, Quem não sabe faz a hora espera acontecer. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8184-013X

Group members

Salvatore E. Pappalardo is an assistant professor at the School of Engineering, specializing in GIScience and Environmental Geography. His research focuses on extreme weather events (heatwaves) and climate justice, biodiversity, ecosystem services, Indigenous territories, and participatory GIS. He is responsible for the GIScience & Drones for Good Lab and Vice-Director of the Advanced Master in GIScience and UAS. He is responsible for several courses on digital earth and geovisualization, climate change, drone applications, GIS, and remote sensing (UASB, Quito). He collaborates with various international institutions on climate justice, biodiversity conservation, and resilient territorial development. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1546-644X
Daniele Codato, naturalist and PhD in Human and Physical Geography. He is currently affiliated with the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (ICEA) at the University of Padova, where he teaches and coordinates the educational activities of the Master’s Programme in GIScience and Remote Sensing. Before his PhD research in Peru, he gained various experiences in Latin America, beginning in Ecuador in 2008 during his Master Degree thesis in Natural Sciences, where he collaborated with an Ecuadorian NGO on sustainable development initiatives in an Indigenous community of the Ecuadorian Amazon. He later worked in Peru within the framework of the Italian National Civil Service abroad, focusing on environmental issues, particularly socio-environmental conflicts in the Peruvian Amazon, through participatory mapping projects with local communities. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0704-4041
Francesca Peroni, PhD in Historical, Geographical, Anthropological Studies, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) fellow at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (ICEA) at the University of Padova. Her MSCA project RESTART (Urban climate justice and community participation: towards inclusive adaptation strategies) addresses climate justice in cities (Padova - Italy, Hermosillo - Mexico, Tempe - USA), focusing on heatwaves and integrating procedural, distributional, and recognitional justice dimensions. She also works on urban sustainability (soil sealing, land use change, NbS, and ecosystem services), adopting the approaches of GIScience. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2389-5612
Francesco Facchinelli, PhD in Historical, Geographical, and Anthropological Studies at the University of Padua. His research focuses on the use of GIScence to support grassroots processes for climate and environmental justice, as well as agroecology as an alternative to the extractivist model. Specific case studies range from monitoring oil gas flaring and agroecological alternatives in the Ecuadorian Amazon to monitoring land consumption and heat islands in urban areas. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5740-8435
Edoardo Crescini, is a PhD candidate at the School of Civil, Environmental and Building Engineering at the University of Padua. His research employs innovative geographic technologies (GIS, drones, and remote sensing) to promote participatory processes of independent territorial monitoring. He focuses on the concept of the Plantationocene and on the neocolonial and neoliberal dynamics linked to monocultural oil palm plantations, developing possible agroecological transition plans as alternatives to the current agro-industrial model in Ecuador. His work also addresses climate justice, fossil fuel phase-out processes, and the urban impacts of the climate crisis, with particular attention to the development of proactive adaptation and mitigation policies.https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4397-6093
Daniele Vezzelli is a PhD candidate at the School of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering at the University of Padua. His research focuses on climate policies to keep fossil fuels in the ground and to promote a just transition in extractive territories, with particular attention to the Italian context. He also contributes to the World Atlas of Unburnable Carbon project of the University of Padova, applying GIS methods to identify biologically and culturally rich areas where fossil fuels should remain underground, particularly in Brazil and the Arctic. In his Master’s thesis in Natural Sciences, he analyzed geographical criteria to determine the order in which countries or subnational areas should phase out hydrocarbon production, identifying territorial priorities based on principles of equity and climate justice. https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5736-9354
Bianca Russo is the teaching assistant of the international Erasmus Mundus Joint Master on Climate Change and Diversity: Sustainable Territorial Development (CCD-STeDe), coordinated by the University of Padova. She is also in charge of the management of the project funded by the European Commission and the dissemination and communication of the EMJM program CCD-STeDe online, both through the website and social media. She provides support to the implementation of the didactic activities and is in charge of the logistic and organizational aspects of seminars (both online and in presence), events, fieldworks and summer schools.
Giuseppe Della Fera, PhD student at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (University of Padova), with a background in natural sciences and urban planning. His research focuses on climate change at the urban scale, using Local Climate Zone mapping and analysis to develop climate-responsive planning tools and policies grounded in climate justice and spatial equity. Since 2016, he has collaborated with the research group on the impacts of oil extraction, applying Unburnable Carbon approaches in areas of high biological and cultural diversity, with a focus on territorial and environmental policies, ecotourism and sustainability. Since 2019, he has coordinated the design of teaching activities for the Advanced Master's Programme in GIScience and drones, and since 2023 he has been a contract lecturer for the course "Design of Green Infrastructures". He also contributes to scientific events, public engagement and the communication of research and teaching activities through web and social media.
Abdullah Ahmadi is a PhD candidate in Human Rights, Society & Multi-level Governance at the University of Padua. His research focuses on applying remote sensing and open-source GIS to inform urban planning and climate justice, with emphasis on land-use change, green-infrastructure planning, and climate-vulnerability mapping. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at UniPD’s Drone4Good Lab and an Environmental Geologist at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7135-6342

Mathilde Gingembre, PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex), is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) fellow at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (ICEA) at the University of Padova. A political ecologist, she works on climate governance, green capitalism, environmental justice and the politics of land access and control. Her research spans Madagascar, Jordan and rural Europe. Her MSCA project JUSTLANDING (Landing Just Transitions: Local Politics and Land Justice in European Renewable Energy Development) uses comparative ethnography in Gers (France) and Veneto (Italy) to analyse the contested politics of solar energy planning and develop a land-sensitive just transition framework.

Claudio Stefanini, PhD, is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Padua. His research focuses on meteorology, climatology, and statistical analysis, with a particular interest in historical climatology, the recovery and homogenization of multi-century weather and climate series, as well as the study of extreme events and the polar environment. He collaborates on his research with CNR and ARPAV. He earned his PhD in Polar Sciences at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with IFAC-CNR and Université Grenoble Alpes, specializing in topics related to remote sensing, glaciology, and Antarctic meteorology. In addition, he has gained several years of professional experience as a meteorologist and R&D researcher in private companies such as Radarmeteo and Meteoblue. During his academic background, he obtained his degree in Physics at the University of Padua.
Alberto Diantini, geographer and naturalist, he is currently a Post-Doc Researcher. He teaches the courses of Environmental Conflicts, Climate Justice and Social Impact Assessment, and Foundations and Didactics of Geography at the University of Padua. His research focuses on Social Impact Assessment processes and environmental conflicts in oil-producing territories, using an approach that integrates political ecology, decolonial methodologies, and autoethnographic practices. Other research lines address Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) practices and Indigenous rights, agroecology, and scenarios of climate-change adaptation and resilience in deltaic areas, with a particular focus on the Po Delta.

Francesco Ferrarese è laureato in Geografia presso l'Università di Padova dove lavora come esperto GIS ( Geographic Information System) dal 2000. E’ esperto GIS ed elaborazione dei dati stata in più di 20 progetti di ricerca per diversi Dipartimenti dell'Università di Padova. Si interessa di Geomorfologia, Telerilevamento, Geomorfometria, Carsismo, Geoarcheologia, analisi GIS  e mappatura.