Maria Antonia Tigre is the Director of Latin America for the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE). Through GNHRE, she has increasingly focused her efforts on human rights-based climate litigation in Latin America. She is also a coordinator of the human rights group, with a particular focus on ecological rights, for the Global Pandemic Network (GPN), a community of scholars created to debate legal aspects associated with pandemics.

 

Ms. Tigre is currently finishing her S.JD. in international environmental law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Her research focuses on the current state of global environmental crises and the development of potential new legal solutions through philosophical, religious, and legal arguments. She is the author of ‘Gaps in International Environmental Law: Toward a Global Pact for the Environment,’ published by ELI Press in 2020. ‘Gaps’ is a travaux preparatoires of a potential new agreement on environmental principles, which is currently under debate at the United Nations.

 

Ms. Tigre is the author and co-author of several publications on themes related to Latin American and international environmental law. She specifically focuses on issues concerning environmental rights and the reshaping of the existing framework of international environmental law. Originally from Brazil, she also researches environmental protection of the Amazon ecosystem, with an emphasis on regional cooperation. She has published in a series of peer-reviewed academic journals, including in Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, International Environmental Agreements, Transnational Environmental Law, and Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law. Her first book, ‘Regional Cooperation in Amazonia: A Comparative Environmental Law Analysis,’ was published in 2017. She is a TEDx speaker; in her talk, she argued for a regional cooperative approach for environmental protection in Amazonia.

 

Ms. Tigre has previously worked in the private sector and at the World Resources Institute (WRI). She was a senior attorney at the Environment Program of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, where she provided pro bono legal services to NGOs across the globe, especially in issues related to protected areas and the interface between human rights and the environment. Ms. Tigre is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. She holds a dual LL.M. from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University (Environmental Law and Comparative Legal Studies), from where she graduated magna cum laude. Ms. Tigre was a visiting scholar at Widener Law School and Maurice A. Dean Law School at Hofstra University. She received her LL.B. from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.