The Green Teaching Award 2023

For the third year in a row, the Environmental Council of the University of Akureyri awards the Green Teaching Award. The award is given to teachers who have integrated environmental protection into their courses. Yvonne Höller, chairman of the Environmental Council presented the award this year on behalf of the council.

“With the Green Teaching Award, we want to highlight how the best teachers at UNAK link sustainability to virtually all aspects of life through their scientific expertise and environmental commitment,” Yvonne says.

This year it is Sara Fusco, a part-time teacher at the Faculty of Law who receives the award. Human rights and environment protection.

Sara gets the award for the course European Convention of Human Rights.

Sara is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Law, with research on the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in Enviromental Constitutionalism in the Arctic. “I focus on how Arctic Constitutions are adapting to international Environmental Law and analyse how Indigenous communities and their cosmovision are involved in this global legal process,” Sara says.

Sara graduated with a LLM degree in Polar Law from the Faculty of Law at the University of Akureyri in 2019 and has taught at the faculty since 2020. “I mainly teach Comparative Law and Human Rights, but recently I planned to teach a new course called Green Transition and Anthropocene: Icelandic Ecological Strategies. The course was meant for companies, but the University and Yvonne are now assisting me in allowing even UNAK students to attend it from next year. I nominated myself to the awards with the course European Convention on Human Rights since human rights are linked to a healthy environment,” Sara explains.

“I applied to the prize also because socio-cultural analysis cannot be excluded when studying the impacts of climate change. Nature is the place where human beings live and develop, and this is why it is important to include the social sciences to achieve SDG's goals. I am now working on defining the “Indigenous Ecological Grief” to demonstrate how law should adopt a cultural oriented approach to environmental degradation issue“ says Sara.

We congratulate Sara on receiving the awards!