Navigating global challenges: the role of consumer choices in addressing antimicrobial resistance and marine biodiversity loss (GLOCAL)

Jasmin Otte

I am part of the GLOCAL project, which explores how everyday consumer choices can help address two urgent global challenges: antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and marine biodiversity loss. The project investigates how global issues are linked to local consumer behavior on Gotland and aims to make complex scientific knowledge more accessible, enabling individuals to act more sustainably.

My PhD research focuses on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how consumers’ food choices can play a role in reducing it. By studying how knowledge and awareness shape behavior, I aim to find ways to support consumers in making informed and sustainable decisions that contribute to better public health and long-term resilience against AMR.

About me

My name is Jasmin, and I am a PhD student in the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. Before starting my PhD, I completed a B.Sc. in Psychology and an M.Sc. in Sustainable Management. By combining these two backgrounds, I aim to contribute to research on AMR and marine biodiversity loss as interconnected threats to global health and sustainability, with a special focus on how we as consumers can drive positive change.

Valentina Montesano

As part of the GLOCAL project, I will devote myself to study global threats affecting the planet at the interface between social and natural systems. While my colleague Jasmin Otte will be studying antibiotic resistance (AMR), I will study how biodiversity loss affects the marine environment around Gotland, and how this is connected to human behaviours, and consumer choices in particular. Starting from an island case study, the project will investigate how global threats affect socio-ecological networks on a local scale. GLOCAL’s view is to foster more sustainable approaches and choices, involving social actors and empowering them to adopt science-informed choices, that could eventually create highly contextual and effective solution to environmental problems.

My research will focus on marine biodiversity loss, and the complex role that consumer choice can play in the solution or mitigation or mitigation of global crisis on a local scale.

By studying the complex interactions between social actors and marine biodiversity and environment, I will study the processes that lead to negative impacts on marine biodiversity, as well as the constraints and the reasons for consumer behaviours.

Once I will have understood this, I will contribute to develop strategies to support citizens to make less impacting consumption choices.

About me

As a curious person with an eclectic taste, ending up to work on a truly interdisciplinary project is a thrilling challenge.

Interdisciplinary research has always been part of my research interests. In fact, my background is in both social and environmental sciences: I hold a BSc in Sociology from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and a joint MSc in Marine Sciences from the University of Milano-Bicocca and Maldives National University. For my master thesis, I worked in collaboration with the University of Tokyo (東京大学) on a dissertation on Japanese social actors’ understanding of and relationship with the sea, and how this could shape conservation in Japan.

I also worked as a scientific trainee at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission on a project aiming to reduce the impact of fishery on biodiversity, in particular through the reduction of bycatches.

My previous experiences may have equipped me with some knowledge and skills, still the task is not trivial, and it will entail sailing a sea of uncertainties. Quite literally. I still have much to learn and to experience, in order to gaining a grasp on the relationship between marine biodiversity and consumer choices. I just have to hope that the always-blowing wind of Gotland Island will be in my favour, and that the research will give good, and maybe unexpected, results.