Celina Schelle

Celina Schelle is a passionate advocate for inclusiveness in landscape-based solutions and aims to open gateways for youth involvement in achieving these. She serves as the focal point to the UN Forum on Forest for the Major Group Children and Youth. Her academic background is in Economics, in which she earned a B.A. at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, and in Environmental Governance, in which she earned an M.Sc. at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She previously worked for IUCN in the field of ecosystem restoration and participatory landscape governance. While living in rural areas of many countries in eastern Africa, she sought to understand local needs and integrate the voice of indigenous communities into governance frameworks for the achievement of sustainability. These experiences inspired her academic research on the inclusiveness of small-scale farmer agroforestry businesses in Kenya to identify possibilities to scale impact.