Dr. Lina Eklund specializes in land system dynamics in the context of migration and armed conflict, using mainly earth observation and spatial analysis.
Dr. Lina Eklund specializes in land system dynamics in the context of migration and armed conflict, using mainly earth observation and spatial analysis. She is specifically interested in the Middle East and has been doing research primarily on Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. At UNU-INWEH, she explores the issue of climate security in the Middle East, including climate-induced migration and armed conflict. She also studies the environmental impacts of armed conflict and is particularly interested in land use/land cover change and fire dynamics.
In 2015, she received the best thesis award from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) for her PhD thesis, named “No Friends but the Mountains” Understanding Population Mobility and Land Dynamics in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her post-doctoral contributions included serving as the coordinator of “the Nature of Peace” project to explore how transitions to peace interacted with the physical environment, researching climate migration at Aalborg University, and contributing a chapter on water and migration to the Water chapter of the IPCC AR6 WGII: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.
Eklund holds a PhD in Physical Geography. She is an associate senior lecturer at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science and a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University.