Laura Scherer is an assistant professor in CML’s Industrial Ecology department since 2017. She is interested in research in the fields of regionalized life cycle assessment, water resources, and biodiversity conservation.

More information about Laura Scherer

Laura Scherer is an assistant professor in CML’s Industrial Ecology department since 2017. She is interested in research in the fields of regionalized life cycle assessment, water resources, and biodiversity conservation. She is a member of the WULCA EQ working group (Water Use in LCA – Ecosystem Quality), a UNEP/SETAC life cycle initiative. In addition, she teaches in the Master’s programme Industrial Ecology.

Professional Experience

Laura obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016. During her doctoral studies, she analysed the environmental impacts of water consumption and degradation at regional and global scales. She applied her research to the agriculture and energy sectors. Afterwards, as a postdoctoral researcher at VU Amsterdam, she coordinated the European research project VITAL where she evaluated the opportunities and constraints for sustainable intensification of agriculture in Europe.

Research topic

Laura’s research currently focuses on environmental cause prioritization. She will apply the importance-neglectedness-tractability framework which was developed in Oxford to identify which environmental challenges should be prioritized to work on. In this regard, she also visited the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University in February 2019. The project is an international collaboration led by Laura, which involves key researchers in the fields of biodiversity & ecosystems or agriculture & food security from the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, and the United States. To address the first criterion of the framework, an online survey was distributed in mid-March 2019 with the objective to determine importance scores for different environmental challenges.

Publications