Dr Elisa Fornalé

Elisa Fornalé is Associate Professor at the World Trade Institute (WTI), University of Bern. She holds a law degree from the University of Trento, Italy, and a PhD in law from the University of Palermo, Italy, and she specialises in international law, climate change, human mobility and human rights.

She is currently the Work Package Leader for Climate of the HEurope ‘Human Rights Justification’ project (States’ Practice of Human Rights Justification: A Study in Civil Society Engagement and Human Rights through the Lens of Gender and Intersectionality).

From  2021 to 2024, she was the Principal Investigator of the SNSF project “Gender Equality in the Mirror (GEM)” which explored women’s participatory rights. In 2018, she was appointed as the WTI’s Gender Coordinator, with the mandate to implement the Gender Action Plan at the WTI. Prof. Fornalé has initiated the “Gender Lecture Series – Know the GAP” that has so far involved twenty-five leading speakers from around the country and Europe who were invited to address pressing gender issues.

From 2017 to 2022, she implemented the SNSF project “Framing Environmental Degradation, Human Mobility and Human Development as a Matter of Common Concern (CLI_M_CO2)”. The project aimed to identify the climate-mobility nexus change through a pilot case study in the Small Pacific Island States. From 2016 until 2019, she was the lead scientist for the WTI of the Horizon 2020 project Climate Security with Local Authorities (CLISEL), which addressed the local dimension of the climate change–security nexus.

From 2021 to 2024 she served as co-Rapporteur of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise. .

Previously, as the recipient of a Marie Curie Intra-European Individual Fellow award, she conducted a research project on regional migration governance at the Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence for Migration Law at the Radboud University, Nijmegen (2015–2016). Elisa Fornalé has been a visiting scholar at the University of Auckland, the University of Vanuatu and the United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security.  As a legal scholar and activist, she provided commentaries on some of the cutting-edge legal topic, including on the adopted Global Compact for Migration.