Eliza Breder is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California Berkeley, where she was a LAU Just Climate Futures Fellow. She works in disaster studies, critical cartography, planning and design. Her research reveals how legacies of hydro-colonialism underpin social vulnerability in the face of climate risk. Legacies of hydro-colonialism continue to shape landscapes at the nexus of water, human, and non-human ecologies furthering the complexities of de-tangling from technocratic norms in climate mitigation planning.

Eliza’s current research project “The Drainage Archive” documents the long history of social and spatial displacement through colonial control of Deltas. Historically distinct but structurally similar, the case comparison between the Saskatchewan River Delta and the Everglades Delta allows for the investigation of hydro-colonial typologies and their political-economic structures across North America. Rooted in Clyde Woods’ framework of Delta Capitalism, water control boards and management structures are chronicled for their hidden and overt power imbalances.

Prior to her PhD, Eliza spent five years in water conservation research and management and subsequently, worked at the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, where she contributed to citywide adaptation plans, community workshops, and awarded EPA grants. Her mission to contribute to equity in planning and design continued through strategic planning and landscape research in Dr. Rivera’s Just Environment Lab at Berkeley, focusing on California’s Central Valley and the impacts of the 2023 Atmospheric Rivers. She brings this professional and scholarly experience into her four years as an academic teaching assistant. She has assisted in studios on sea level rise adaptation and environmental planning, a course on social factors in design, and led a course on Equity and the Archive that bridges historical analysis with the future-oriented demands of planning and design.

Eliza is a co-author of the chapter “Fuera SpaceX: Resisting Climate Coloniality via Terra Nullius within Contested Boca Chica State Park” with Danielle Rivera in the Book Confronting Climate Coloniality by Farhana Sultana. Her research on historic ecologies, water, reparations, and climate adaptation has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Disaster Prevention and Management, Area, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, and Water Science. She holds a BSc in Sustainability and the Built Environment, an MSc in Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and a Master of Landscape Architecture.