Dr Annette Hübschle is a Chief Research Officer in the Public Law Department and co-leads the Global Risk Governance Programme affiliated with the Centre of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. She leads the Environmental and Planetary Futures research group, which focuses on the governance of environmental, climate and AI risks and harms, illegal markets, and transnational crimes. Her work sits at the intersection of public law, criminology, and economic sociology, with a particular focus on how harms are produced, governed, and contested across socio-ecological systems.

A core contribution of her scholarship is the development and application of harmscapes as a lens for analysing environmental and security harms, including how these harms are distributed unevenly across the Global South and how communities live with and respond to them. She also works on contested and irregular regulation (including legal pluralities and “grey zones”), examining how regulatory ambiguity and enforcement choices shape illegal and legal markets—especially in wildlife, collectables, and resource economies.

Her newer research advances AI harmscapes: the risks, governance gaps, and justice implications emerging from AI systems as they interact with unequal infrastructures, exclusion, and environmental and security futures. In this area, she leads the AI governance and community engagement streams of the IDRC-funded African hub for AI Safety, Peace and Security at UCT.