Chiarina is a Senior Consultant with expertise in the evaluation and development of policy and other kinds of interventions in the environmental sector.
She also has experience in assessing the policy context and its influence on the market for environmental services and technologies, as well as on the outlook for future environmental initiatives, regulation and legislation. She has delivered projects involving impact assessment, cost benefit analysis, legislative gap analysis, knowledge gap analysis, and the production of policy recommendations, using both desk-based and stakeholder research methods.
She primarily works in the fields of marine, land based and aquatic litter, waste and resources, natural resources and ecosystem services.
Recent Experience
Chiarina has conducted extensive research into marine and land-based litter, and co-authored a number of reports on its impacts and potential solutions. Over the past years she has spoken at many meetings and discussion groups on the subject.
For DG Environment, Chiarina recently contributed to a model of the mass flow and costs for management of plastic waste in diverse sectors, to produce estimates of strategic infrastructure capacity and investment requirements to meet future recycling targets.
Chiarina also provided research to support the European Commission’s Plastics Strategy and proposed Directives on single-use plastics and fishing gear. This involved assessing the barriers to circularity in the use of plastics in several different sectors, assessing policy measures to tackle these, as well as researching mass flow of marine litter for the modelling of the impacts of selected measures.
In 2016 she worked with DG Environment on a project on the mitigation of marine debris from sea-based sources and primary microplastics, which included recommendations to revise the PRF (Port Reception Facilities) Directive.
Other litter related work includes:
- Reviewing consumption of single-use plastic items and legislative measures for addressing this for Seas at Risk;
- Reviewing global and European legislative and intergovernmental processes for addressing marine litter for OSPAR and HELCOM;
- Assessing methodologies for the monitoring of litter reaching the freshwater aquatic environment and its sources and pathways for the Clean Europe Network;
- Investigating the impact of marine litter on migratory species for UNEP;
- Assessing the direct and indirect costs of litter for Zero Waste Scotland, Keep Britain Tidy, Keep Northern Ireland Beautiful and WRAP; and,
- Research and analysis of community-based options for litter prevention for Zero Waste Scotland.
Career History
Chiarina has a degree in Biological Sciences and a PhD in Plant Sciences from the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Eunomia in 2012, she was a postdoctoral researcher on biofuel feedstock improvement funded by Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project and hosted in the Bioenergy lab at the VIB (Flanders Institute of Biotechnology), Belgium. She has published both original research and literature reviews in peer-reviewed journals.