Olivia Lazard

Olivia, from France, advises EDRC in its work on environmental security issues. She is also member of the North-Atlantic Civil-Society Working-Group on Environment and Security (NCWES) coordinated by EDRC.

Olivia is an environmental peacemaking and mediation expert. She is director of Peace in Design Consulting Ltd, a boutique consultancy company specialised in in-field analysis, research, impact evaluations and strategy design in conflict and fragile zones. She is also a visiting researcher at Carnegie Europe where she focuses on the geopolitics of climate change and associated translations as well as the democratic challenges stemming from the climate crisis. 

Olivia has over twelve years of experience working in mediation, peacebuilding and stabilization. She has run deep field missions on behalf of the UN, the EU and various NGOs across the world. Some of her missions include researching and designing the national PVE strategy in the Central African Republic; programmatic research on the links between livelihoods, displacement and conflict in the Syrian refugee crisis. She now focuses exclusively on the political economy and the political ecology of conflicts at local, regional and international levels, with a goal to influence multilateral responses to the challenges associated to environmental plundering and climate impacts. 

Olivia holds a dual Masters’ degree in International Security and International Political Economy from Sciences Po Paris and from the London School of Economics. She is fluent in French and English, and has a working knowledge of Spanish, Italian.