Louise Gallagher

Dr. Louise Gallagher is the environmental governance lead for UNEP/GRID-Geneva’s Global Sand Observatory initiative. 

Louise has worked at the nexus of sustainable development themes over the past fifteen years in various roles at UN Environment, WWF, and the University of Geneva, among other organisations. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin, specialising in environmental policy analysis.  

At UN Environment, Louise worked on fisheries subsidies reform at the WTO, the waste and circular economy chapter in the Green Economy Report (2008) and the first Global Chemicals Outlook (2011). In 2012, she founded WWF’s green economy programme in the Greater Mekong region, supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development outcomes in major transboundary landscapes across the region. She led a collaborative research programme on ‘valuing nature’ strategies for innovation for WWF from 2014 to 2017. Her research and teaching at the UNESCO Chair of Hydropolitics, University of Geneva focussed on sustainability assessment approaches that open up deliberative policy and local action opportunities in multilevel water, energy and food resource governance from 2017 to 2020. 

Louise worked with UNEP/GRID-Geneva in 2018 to lead the production of the UNEP (2019) report on Sand and Sustainability.  She rejoined to coordinate research and governance activities under UNEP/GRID-Geneva’s Global Sand Observatory initiative in 2020. She continues to publish on themes of water-energy-food nexus governance, complexity-informed policy evaluation, and the design and implementation of participatory and transdisciplinary research processes in sustainability transformations.