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FNP researcher George Iordachescu among five in WU to receive ERC grant
George will receive a 1.5 million euro Starting Grant from the European Research Council to research how the strict protection of biodiversity in Europe's marginal areas can affect human-environment relations.
George is among five researchers at Wageningen University who have been awarded the prestigious award this year. George joined FNP in February 2024 as a post-doctoral researcher. While holding this position, he has been focusing on researching rewilding conflicts as part of the larger wildE project funded by Horizon Europe.
The ERC Starting Grants are awarded to talented young scientists and scholars to consolidate their careers and offer them excellent conditions to become independent researchers. A total of 780 million Euros have been awarded this year to 494 successful proposals, out of a total of 3,474 applications. “This funding scheme is extremely competitive with scientific excellence being the sole criterion,” says George.
Prior to joining FNP, George worked for almost 10 years on the politics of conservation and just environmental futures, researching into a range of processes unfolding in various regions of Eastern Europe: the emergence of private protected areas, the impacts of illegal logging on social and environmental justice and the trafficking in European species.
With the current ERC award, George will expand his research agenda into the governance of nature protection in the European Union. His project is titled ‘GreenFrontier: Politics of Conservation and Unequal Ecological Exchange in European Peripheries’.
George: “It is a timely one, since the EU has committed to expand the strict protection of nature to 10 per cent of Europe’s land by 2030, a bold target considering the current figure of 3 per cent of strict protected areas. These commitments are part of the European Green Deal and are tightly connected to EU’s green growth vision of valuing wilderness as an attempt to fix the biodiversity and climate crisis.” George is interested in the current attempts to link economic growth to biodiversity conservation and the expansion of protected areas and aims to critically investigate the uneven geographies of these developments.
The ERC grant will provide for hiring a team of three postdoctoral researchers and one research assistant to investigate how strict protection of biodiversity reshapes socio-environmental relations in four mountain regions at the margins of Europe. These are the Southern Carpathian Mountains in Romania, the Central Cantabrians in Spain, the Central Apennines in Italy and the Bieszczady in Southeast Poland – all marginal areas usually overlooked by academic debates. Influenced by scholarship in political ecology, anthropology and environmental history, George and his team will do long-term ethnographic research in these areas while organising a range of events to engage policymakers and relevant stakeholders at the EU and national levels for the next five years.
His project and those of the other four WUR researchers are also featured here.
(Photo at top shows the cultural landscape in the Southern Carpathisn Mountains, Romania - Photo by George Iordachescu 2024)
