Carlos Felipe obtained his PhD degree at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), where he also obtained his M.Sc. degree in Industrial Ecology. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia.

More information about Carlos Felipe Blanco Rocha

Professional experience

Carlos Felipe obtained his PhD degree at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), where he also obtained his M.Sc. degree in Industrial Ecology. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. Between 2006-2014, Carlos Felipe worked in the mining industry as a Health, Safety, Environment and Community Relations (HSEC) manager in several countries in Latin America including Chile, Peru, Colombia, Guyana and Brazil. In these roles, he led social and environmental impact studies for mining and minerals exploration projects, developed environmental mine closure plans and served as a lead EHS critical incident investigator. He was also tasked with environmental auditing and implementing ISO14001 and OHSAS18001 standards and related training programmes. In the period 2014-2018 Carlos Felipe worked as an independent sustainability consultant for the mining, energy and forestry sectors and developed software solutions for stakeholder engagement programs in several large-scale mining projects.

In his PhD thesis, Carlos Felipe proposed various methods to appraise the safety and sustainability of emerging technologies and demonstrated them with a case study of high-efficiency III-V/Silicon solar cells. In his MSc thesis, Carlos Felipe developed a framework to assess ecosystem services in LCA and demonstrated it by a case study of water supply for mining in the north of Chile. The M.Sc. thesis was awarded the Stans prize by CML in 2016.

Research topic

Carlos Felipe’s current research focus is Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (including LCA and Social-LCA) and Ecological Risk Assessment of emerging technologies with a special focus on safe and sustainable design of energy technologies. Developing quantitative forward-looking models in these domains requires comprehensive and robust methods for scenario analysis, uncertainty analysis and global sensitivity analysis. Carlos Felipe’s current research aims to increase the applicability and usefulness of such methods in the field of sustainability and to establish linkages with developments in related fields such as Bayesian Analysis and Machine Learning.

Carlos Felipe is currently a main lecturer for the course Society’s Metabolism in the Industrial Ecology master’s programme and supports the LCA Practice & Reporting course offered by the same programme. He is also the main lecturer for the course Environment & Development offered by Leiden University College.

Publications