Dr Aiora Zabala is Lecturer in Economics at The Open University, and Senior Fellow at the Department of Land Economy, where she delivers lectures and coordinates teaching in Environmental Policy and Economics. She has taught environmental policy, economics and methods since 2013. Between 2017 and 2021 she was full-time Senior Editor at the scientific journal Nature Sustainability, assessing research manuscripts across the social sciences and writing science communication pieces for a broad audience.

Her research is focused on challenges for implementation and effectiveness of environmental and sustainability governance across scales, particularly on two areas: understanding the diversity of views on controversial or conflictual issues, and the spatial variability of impacts. This includes adoption and diffusion of sustainable land-use practices, social implications of biodiversity indicators, policy acceptability, and drivers and motivations of behavioural change.

She has published research on a range of sustainability policies, such as environmental and conservation programs in rural areas in Mexico and South Africa, deforestation drivers at large scales, peatland fires in Indonesia, and public policy for sustainable transport to industrial estates. Her work is published in journals like Ecological Economics, Global Environmental Change and World Development.

She approaches these questions using a pluralistic methodological approach. Her methods' expertise includes R statistical language, Q methodology to understand perspectives and conflicting narratives, econometrics, multi-criteria decision methods, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and data visualisation.

She contributes regularly to major media outlets in her native language, writing a monthly newspaper column and live radio collaborations.