Melissa Ingaruca Moreno

Melissa is a PlanAdapt Fellow, based in Berlin, Germany.

She has a decade of experience in stakeholder engagement, knowledge management in international climate action, and a more recent experience in research and design of urban nature-based solutions climate-aware urban planning.

Her most recent experience is on innovations in urban nature-based solutions, both as a researcher and designer/artist. She is a team leader in the Thematic Research Group “Worldviews and urban nature-based innovations” of NATURA (Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene) and was awarded with a NATURA research fellowship for the Urban System Lab at The New School (New York), to explore the uses of cognitive technologies (AI, sensors, mixed reality) and biotechnologies (bio-fabrication, synthetic biology) in urban nature-based solutions. Similarly, she has been a Research Fellow at the Technical University of Berlin on the topic of urban planning for climate adaptation and carbon neutrality. Prior to that, she has been a research internship she worked on topics such as experiential foresight at the Urban Future Studio at Utrecht University, and the use of extended reality technologies (VR, AR and mixed reality) in sustainable urban planning for the project Augmented Urbans at Stockholm University.

Moreover, she is a designer inspired by multispecies thinking. Currently, she is a member of MYCOTINKERS, a myco-community of makers and innovators that explore fabrication methods with mycelium. She has also worked with experiential learning to re-imagine cohabitation with other species e.g. a summer school of multispecies architecture that took place in the Floating University (an experimental urban lab for naturecultures in Berlin) as well as, having developed speculative design and sci-fiction projects e.g. a story of humans inhabiting other animals sensorial worlds in the city of Berlin; and a design proposal ‘Sensecilium: Multispecies smartness for Biocities in the Amazon‘ that was selected for the publication of IAAC Biocities architecture competition 2022.

Her other focus of expertise is in research, stakeholder engagement, and communication to support climate action and carbon neutrality pathways. This includes the development of knowledge and communication products such as conceptual frameworks, roadmaps, reports, and case studies; and capacity-building products such as leadership programs, toolkits, and workshops for a varied set of stakeholders: governments, cities, universities, private companies, and civil society. For example, as a consultant in Libelula (Peru), she has developed a toolkit for carbon neutrality pathways for the Latin-American private sector, a toolbox to engage Peruvian municipalities in the INDC consultation, and a matrix of indicators to assess climate action in Peruvian universities. Moreover, she has years of experience working in climate justice and intergenerational equity. From a procedural perspective of justice, she has worked to advocate for youth participation in climate governance: to include young people in bodies of decision-making, ensure institutionalization of participation mechanisms, and to mainstream intergenerational justice into national and international climate policy cycles and content. For example, she developed a report to support youth meaningful participation in NDC’s enhancement and climate governance for UNDP, based on extensive desktop research and global youth e-consultations (see report).

Her academic background is in audio-visual communications and she holds an MSc degree in social-ecological resilience for sustainable development at the Stockholm Resilience Center, and a self-taught education in transdisciplinary design and biodesign.

For more info, see Melissa’s LinkedIn page.