Research focus: assessment of the fairness and ambition of climate pledges, national and subnational ambition, international climate finance, climate litigation & justice

Profile and publication summary at: yannrobioudupont.org

Current projects

Yann received a Marie Curie fellowship to quantify what are fair and ambitious emissions reductions and financial contributions from businesses, national and subnational actors to align with the Paris Agreement mitigation goals. Specifically, this project will first extend current national level effort-sharing formulas to the subnational levels in order to discuss the contributions that can be expected from cities and regions in light of their financial and political limitations. Secondly, it will quantify the financial support that countries can provide or receive as part of a fair contribution to enable the implementation of the IPCC mitigation scenarios.

Alongside his research, Yann is engaging with dissemination activities to bring scientific findings where they can have the most impact.

Published work and impact

Yann holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne that focused on quantifying equitable mitigation scenarios for all countries to meet the Paris Agreement goals. His results, published in Nature Climate Change and Nature Communications, are behind the interactive Paris-Equity-Check.org website that assesses the ambition of countries emissions pledges. These studies are used in IPCC and UNEP reports, court cases, by diplomats at UN climate negotiations and by national and subnational government to set their emissions targets (net-zero target and 2030 NDC of the UK, the Government of Victoria). A 3-minute video summary is available here.

Paris-Equity-Check.org

Other working experience in climate action

Prior to joining Utrecht University, Yann worked as consultant and with IDDRI, Climate Analytics, adelphi, the CVF secretariat, and OpenEarth Foundation. As part of his missions, Yann has worked:

- with country delegations from over 60 country delegations from both the Global North and Global South, and NGOs
- informing justice courts on the ambition of countries' or companies' climate pledges towards global climate goals (contribution to Klimaseniorinnen v. Switzerland, Urgenda v. the Netherlands, People's climate case v. the EU, Portuguese Children v. Council of European members before the European Courts of Human Rights, and a case against oil major TotalEnergie)
- for subnational governments of Australia and C40 on commissioned reports to inform their climate targets
- with other research projects on land-use change, subnational climate action, and climate policy

Early studies

Yann's background is in physics, with a Magistère in fundamental physics and a Master in Climate physics. Before specialising on climate justice, Yann had research experiences in physical oceanography (University of Harvard and Paris Sorbonne), hydrology (University of California, Berkeley), sea-ice modelling (McGill University) and cosmology (University of Oxford).

Profile picture credit: Celine Jacq