Research interests:

• Environmental and urban governance, incl. stakeholder dialogues, and civic participation processes
• Energy and environmental policy and politics, and environmental justice
• Nature-driven climate change mitigation and adaptation, urban design & landscape architecture
• Natural capital indicator development and national accounting, economic valuation
• Biodiversity business models and innovative financing mechanisms
• Transdisciplinary and interpretive research design

Empowering people to deal with the manifold complexities of sustainability concerns is a key driver of Sonja Gantioler’s educational and professional life. It influenced her decision to pursue an interdisciplinary study in biology and environmental economics and policy in Munich and Vienna. Later on, it steered her engagement in providing high-quality analysis, research and advice on sustainable finance and environmental policy at EU level in Brussels. Her desire to directly engage key players at city and regional level subsequently led her to take on the role of sustainability consultant, and also resulted in a PhD in spatial development and design at the Technical University Munich. She has been successfully leading and managing a wide range of research projects and studies, and authoring a series of publications with high policy impact.

Linked to her enthusiasm in unravelling the big picture, and combing different views across scientific disciplines and stakeholders, as a senior researcher she currently focuses on the integration of nature-based solutions and on environmental policy and governance in order to identify, clarify and solve the transformational puzzles of a just (energy) transition.

As such she is one of the Principal Investigators of ROLES, a JPI Climate financed project on the ‘Responsive Organising for Low Emission Societies’, and project lead of the Horizon 2020 project JUSTNature: The activation of nature-based solutions for a just low carbon transition.