Larissa Sweeney

About

Larissa Sweeney is the current Coordinator and a Research Associate with the Community Conservation Research Network (CCRN). As the Coordinator, she creates a variety of outreach materials for the network, including social media posts, webpages, and the quarterly newsletter, ‘Communities, Conservation & Livelihoods Review’, in addition to coordinating webinars and events for a diverse, global audience. As a Research Associate, Larissa gets to contribute to a wide array of cross-disciplinary research endeavors, conducting research on community-based conservation, sustainable fishery systems, small-scale fisheries, and coastal communities. Larissa is passionate about building capacity and resilience in local communities and creating long-lasting solutions in conservation.

Larissa’s interests lie in the social dimensions of contemporary environmental issues and relate to environmental equity and justice. It is this interest that led Larissa to complete a Master of Arts at Saint Mary’s University School of the Environment (Halifax, Nova Scotia), where she conducted research through the Geography department on the intersection of migration and climate change. For her research, she explored how migration is being viewed as a climate change adaptation strategy in environmental policy, and how local communities in The Gambia (West Africa) are adapting to climate change and to what extent are they using migration to adapt to climate change.

Larissa has previously completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science and Honours Geography through Saint Mary’s University School of Environment. Throughout her undergraduate degree she has worked several different positions from conducting sustainability assessments to working in Nova Scotia’s tidal wetlands, where she has spent countless hours wading through salt marshes and using geographic information systems (GIS) to digitize Nova Scotia’s coastlines. Larissa has also worked on several other research projects throughout this time, including conducting invasive species surveys in the Yukon, a territory in northwest Canada.