Zeina is an academic and environmental journalist. She holds a PhD in environmental politics from Freiburg University in Germany. She was a Visiting Scholar to the Institute of Social Ecology of Alpen Adria University in Vienna in 2014 and to the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden in 2018. In 2021, she was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar to the Department of Political Science of New Hampshire University in the USA.

Since 2015 she has been working as a freelance environmental journalist, writing both in Arabic and English for a number of English blogs and Arabic newspapers such as Al Hayat, Al Rai Al Youm, and the Green Future. She has covered a wide variety of environmental issues spanning from environmental conflicts, international politics of climate change, environmental justice, climate action, and climate coloniality, to green transition with a particular focus on the Global South and the MENA region. She addressed in her investigative reports topics that are considerably underrepresented in the Arab media such as degrowth economy which is based on ideas from political ecology, ecological economics, feminist political ecology, and environmental justice, arguing that social and ecological harm is caused by the pursuit of infinite growth of the current economic system. Another interesting work addressed the climate coloniality and highlighted that the climate crisis is an extension of colonialism’s extractive model, which relied on racist exploitation of forced labor and extraction of natural resources from resource-rich countries in the Global South and the ongoing climate coloniality is maintained through neoliberal extractivism, imperial structures of global trade, and racial capitalism.