Dr. Lina Eklund is an associate senior lecturer at the department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Lund University, Sweden. Eklund specializes in land system dynamics in the context of migration and armed conflict, using mainly earth observation and spatial analysis. She is specifically interested in the Middle East and has been doing research primarily on Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Syria. She is associated with the strategic research areas The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) and Biodiversity and Ecosystems in a Changing Climate (BECC). Currently, she explores the issue of climate security in the Middle East, including climate induced migration and armed conflict. She also studies the environmental impacts of armed conflict, and is particularly interested in land use/land cover change and fire dynamics. 

Eklund finished her PhD in Physical Geography in 2015 with a thesis in named “No Friends but the Mountains” Understanding Population Mobility and Land Dynamics in Iraqi Kurdistan, for which she received a best thesis award from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG). After finishing her PhD, she became coordinator of an interdisciplinary project called "the Nature of Peace" which explored how transitions peace interacted with the physical environment. In 2018 she was selected for a postdoctoral position at Aalborg University, Denmark, to work on a project on climate migration. She also contributed a section on water and migration to the Water chapter of the IPCC AR6 WGII: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, which was published in 2022.