Nikolas Sellheim is an independent consultant working on international conservation law issues, livelihoods and marine mammals. He used to be a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS), where he worked on a post-doc project entitled “Livelihoods, cultures and local communities in international conservation law”, funded by the Finnish Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation.
Dr Sellheim holds a doctorate in law (2016) from the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, in which he focused on the European Union’s ban on trade in seal products and the way Newfoundland sealers have been represented in the drafting process.
The research included fieldwork in the sealing industry in Newfoundland. His dissertation Legislating the Blind Spot. The EU Seal Regime and the Newfoundland Seal Hunt is freely available here.
Dr Sellheim is co-Editor-in-Chief of Polar Record, the journal of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, UK, published by Cambridge University Press. He is also a Fellow of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative (PRPI).
From 2017-2018 Dr Sellheim conducted his first postdoc Polar Cooperation Research Centre (PCRC) at Kobe University, Japan, where he did research on the Arctic legal order as well as on small-type coastal whaling, including fieldwork in the dolphin drive in Taiji. The stay was funded my the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Dr Sellheim has attended and presented at academic conferences all over the world and has been an observer to the International Whaling Commission, CITES, the Bonn Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species and the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Dr Sellheim has extensively published on international conservation law and Arctic governance. He is the author of three monographs and the co-editor of three edited volumes, with a fourth one forthcoming. A list of publications can be found here.
sellheimenvironmental.org 