Dr. Lina Eklund is an Associate Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lund University, Sweden and affiliated with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). Her research covers land system dynamics in the context of migration and armed conflict, primarily using Earth observation data and spatial analysis. She has a particular regional emphasis on the Middle East and has conducted extensive research on Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. Dr. Eklund is affiliated with the strategic research areas The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) and Biodiversity and Ecosystems in a Changing Climate (BECC).

Dr. Eklund received her PhD in Physical Geography in 2015 with the thesis “No Friends but the Mountains”: Understanding Population Mobility and Land Dynamics in Iraqi Kurdistan, for which she was awarded the Best Thesis Prize by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG). Following her PhD, she served as coordinator of the interdisciplinary research project The Nature of Peace, which examined how transitions to peace interact with the physical environment. In 2018, she was appointed to a postdoctoral position at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she worked on a project on climate migration. She returned to Lund University in 2020 to work on the interdisciplinary project Societal impacts of climate stress: An integrated assessment of drought, vulnerability, and conflict in Syria. During that time, she also contributed a section on water and migration to the Water chapter of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), Working Group II: Climate Change 2022 – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Her current research lies at the intersection of environmental change, armed conflict, and Earth observation, with a particular focus on how wars affect landscapes, ecosystems, and agricultural systems. Using satellite imagery from open and commercial platforms, she documents and analyses conflict‑related damage to built environments, agricultural land, and ecosystems, as well as associated processes such as vegetation loss, soil degradation, and fire dynamics.

Dr. Eklund is an active member and collaborator of the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group (DDMG), an international interdisciplinary collective that develops and applies Earth observation methods to assess environmental and infrastructural damage in conflict and disaster‑affected settings. Through DDMG, she has contributed to peer‑reviewed publications and public‑facing analyses using Sentinel, Landsat, and high‑resolution commercial satellite data, supporting humanitarian response, journalism, and policy discussions. In recognition of this work, Dr. Eklund and the DDMG collaboration were awarded the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Observation Excellence Award (Team Award) in 2025. The award honors outstanding early‑career scientific contributions and innovation in the use of Earth observation data for societal impact and was presented in connection with the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Vienna.