Research Associate, C-EENRG, University of Cambridge

Email address: map75 (at) cam.ac.uk

Biography

Maria Augusta Paim is a Brazilian-qualified lawyer, currently a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG). She is part of the BRIDGE: Building Resilience In a Dynamic Global Economy Project, directed by Professor Viñuales, a UK-Brazil collaboration funded by the Newton Funds/ESRC.

Maria Augusta holds a PhD (international law) with Distinction at the University of São Paulo and a LLM (maritime law) at the University of Southampton (The British Council Chevening Award). Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, she was a Visiting Fellow (international law of the sea) at Queen Mary, University of London, where she has also been invited to be a guest speaker on the International Environmental Law courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Maria Augusta practiced as an advocate for a decade in a renowned law firm in São Paulo, where she gained in depth experience in dispute resolution, primarily in the areas of energy law and general commercial law. She has represented power distribution and generation companies and energy traders in lawsuits and arbitrations involving contracts, energy regulation and civil liabilities matters.

Research interests

As a Research Associate at the BRIDGE Project, Maria Augusta is contributing at the multidisciplinary study about improving governance of the Brazilian Water-Energy-Food Nexus in the context of the climate change strategies. She is looking at laws and policies that aim at strengthening the water, food and energy securities and at tackling the natural resources climate change pressures, addressing the sectors’ interactions in a holistic way. Specifically for the energy sector, she is investigating: (i) the regulation of the water-energy interactions to solve water use competition conflicts between hydropower generators and other water users; (ii) the sustainable transitions policies for the development and adoption of non-hydro renewable energy; and (iii) the energy generation at sea and the Nexus.

During her PhD, she has investigated the legal status of oil platforms to clarify whether they should be deemed ships or artificial islands and the applicable legal regime for structures at sea, including the law and policy of oil platforms decommissioning.

Teaching in the field of energy law

Maria Augusta is a co-lecturer of the interdisciplinary course “Energy and Climate Change” at the MPhill in Environmental Policy offered by the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge.

See also Maria Augusta’s institutional page.