Professor Eeva Furman

Eeva Furman is a member of the working group drafting the UN’s Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, Director of the Environment Policy Centre, Finnish Environment Institute, Chair of Finland’s Sustainable Development Expert Panel, and runs the food-related sustainability project Politics, practices and the transformative potential of sustainable diets, Poprasus. Eeva Furman’s duties include directing the Environmental Policy Centre and being part of the lead group of SYKE. She leads national and international research projects and her positions of trust include chairing and participating boards in the fields of sustainable development, environment, biodiversity, ecosystem services and nature based solutions, and of research linked to them. Eeva Furman has been researching and developing environmental and sustainable development governance for more than 20 years. Her areas of interests reach from protected areas to urban transport, from multiple dwelling to integration of migrants and from diets to human health. Participation, collaborative research, transdisciplinarity as well as experimentation has been in her focus throughout the years. During the last 20 years she has gained experience in international environmental collaboration through R&D projects and processes in the Arctic, Asian, European context, as well as nationally in Finland. She is an ecologist from training (MSc in zoology, University of Helsinki, PhD in marine biology, University of Wales, Menai Bridge). Along the years, she has been active in writing to and communicating with scientific, as well as professional and lay audiences from ministers to scouts and from CEOs to school children. Together her three children, she is the founder of the Ilkka Hanski Nature Network which aims to protect local biodiversity for future generations as well as experiment local community action.