Our team

Ana Lucia Maya-Aguirre. Director and Co-founder. She is a lawyer and specialist in constitutional law of the National University of Colombia, and she holds an LLM in Energy and Environmental Law from Tulane University with the support of the J. William Fulbright scholarship. She is part of the Marine Working Group of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). She was a visiting scholar of the Environmental Constitutionalism Program at the Global Scholar-in-Residence at Delaware Law School, Widener University. She was a fellow at ELAW. She has been consultant at The Access Initiative of the World Resources Institute, Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the Swiss Foundation for Development Cooperation (Swissaid). She worked at the Environment and Society Association of Colombia. She coordinated the Right and Displacement Network, made up of 14 universities in Colombia with programs to address the internally displaced people by the armed conflict, a project implemented by the Latin American Institute for an Alternative Law and Society (ILSA) and supported by UNHCR and the Norwegian Refugee Council. She works on marine and coastal governance, SDG 14, environmental constitutionalism, and climate justice. Contact: anamaya@ceambientales.org

Lina Malagon. Director of the Research Group Marine Justice and Internacional Law. She is a human rights lawyer and PhD in International Relations at University of St Andrews, UK. Her career has balanced academic scholarship, with work as a researcher, litigant and developing advocacy in conflict-affected and post-conflict countries. Her knowledge and experience is based on my interdisciplinary academic career and as a practitioner in the field of human rights, transitional justice and environmental peacebuilding and the construction of public policy in Colombia, other Latin American countries, North America and Europe, for more than sixteen years. She was the principal adviser for High Commissioner for the High Commissioner for Victims, Peace and Reconciliation in the Office of the Major of Bogota, Colombia, and Director of International Advocacy at the Colombian NGO, the Colombian Commission of Jurists. 

The Research Group directed by Lina is endorsed by the Observatory for Marine and Coasta Governance to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia

Héctor Herrera. Co-founder and external advisor. Researcher at the Institute for Development Policy at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He studied Law with an Option in Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes. Master in Public Policy from the National University of Colombia. He was coordinator of the Network for Environmental Justice in Colombia and lawyer of the Inter-American Association for the Defense of the Environment (AIDA) from 2011 to 2016. He has been a consultant and researcher for Indepaz, Oxfam GB and Friends of the Earth in Colombia. He was the Deputy Regional Director for Latin America of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE). His work focuses on climate finance, environmental justice, climate justice, energy justice, water justice, ecosystem protection, fair transitions, environmental participation, ethnic rights, and digital environmental activism.

Melany Velasquez Lozano. Coordinator of education area and researcher. Chemical Engineer graduated with honors from the Universidad del Atlántico (Barranquilla-Colombia) and Master in Environmental Engineering from the Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla-Colombia). At the Observatory for Coastal Marine Governance, she works mainly in the areas of environmental education about the oceans and climate action, participating in research projects on offshore oil exploration and exploitation, and environmental education projects. She also has experience in the handling, management and disposal of solid waste. She has provided environmental advisory services and training on air quality, wastewater discharge, and waste management, both to health personnel and the community in general. She worked as support for the development of an environmental law manual for non-lawyers. In the Master's degree, she leaned towards air quality studies, participating in a project to obtain the carbon footprint generated by the industrial zone belonging to the city of Barranquilla for the year 2016.

Luis Fernando Sánchez PhD. External advisor. Lawyer, magister in law and Phd in law from the National University of Colombia. Professor at the Universidad de la Salle, the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has served as a researcher and consultant on matters related to environmental law, human rights and constitutional law. 

He is the co-author of several publications, such as "Environmental conflicts: conceptual and methodological elements for their analysis" in Environmental Conflict and Environmental Rights Affectation (Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and "Constitutional debates in environmental perspective: contributions to recent Court rulings Constitutional "in contemporary environmental debates (Editorial Unijus Universidad Nacional De Colombia)

Faisury Cardona Guerrero. Researcher Agricultural Engineer and Master in Sustainable Development with an emphasis on Food Sovereignty, from the Universidad del Valle. At the Observatory for Coastal Marine Governance, she works mainly in the areas of artisanal fishing and environmental education. She is a coordinator and researcher in projects to support communities of artisanal fishermen and peasants. University teacher. She has experience in designing and implementing projects on: artisanal fishing, adaptation and mitigation to climate change, sovereignty and agroecology, and artisanal fishing. Experience in environmental education and training, research, application of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, interdisciplinary work and knowledge of academic processes in the university context. She was a member of the research group in Soil and Water Resources Engineering at Universidad del Valle, where she was a beneficiary of the Young Researchers and Innovators internship from COLCIENCIAS in 2012 and 2014.

Edier Alexander Buitrago-Hernández. Researcher. Sociologist from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He holds a postgraduate degree as specialist in Digital Journalism at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University. He was a member of the Human Rights Research Group of the Universidad del Rosario and worked as an assistant coordinator in the Project of the Colombian Observatory of Water Governance. He is the author of one of the chapters of the book "Caring for the earth: women, environment and climate change". He worked as a journalist at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University and he was part of the editorial team of the journalism journal of the same university, Expeditio.