Eleonora Panella

Animal welfare and the environment have always been a strong concern for Eleonora. As a child, she was rescuing and rehabilitating lost kittens from the street and urging her friends to help her clean beaches.

With a background in Biology, and Masters in both Biodiversity and Global Environmental Protection she had dreamed to work at seas with marine mammals, armed with her scuba-diving certificate. However, it is her interest for politics that led to Brussels where she arrived in 2007, with the goal of helping making things better, focusing first on fisheries.

She worked at the European Parliament, for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the European Maritime Safety Agency, and the European Environment Agency, before fully joining the NGO world in 2013, while expanding her scope of work to wildlife in the meantime.

Today, as a Senior Campaigner for IFAW, which she joined in 2016, she advocates to European Institutions the need to protect wildlife, trying to change legislation one-step at a time. While frustration can arise in the face of the time change can take and of the several interests at stake, she sees the change in mentalities and legislations that took place over the past decade, and is hopeful a better world is at hand’s reach for the next generation.