Yann Robiou du Pont

Yann grew up in France and obtainted his Master's in climate, ocean and atmosphere science at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, as well as a Magister in theoretical physics from the University of Paris-Sud. He has various research experience in oceanography (Equatorial Atlantic, Arctic and Antarctica), hydrology, cosmology and sea ice rheology at the universities of Pierre and Marie Curie, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford, Copenhagen and McGill. After a year of field research in Benin and a sailing journey across the Arctic North-West Passage, Yann enrolled in the College in order to model national greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions scenarios following a combination of different vision of climate justice. The research project is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany. 

PhD Project: Avoiding dangerous climate change when nations have different concepts of climate justice

The international community has agreed to limit global warming to 2°C and pursue 1.5°C. Staying within this boundary implies undertaking strong mitigation commitments. At climate conferences, countries exposed different equity concepts to drive the sharing of the required mitigation. The sum of each country's self-determined fair share of the global mitigation burden is insufficient to keep warming below 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. This PhD project will assess how to distribute the GHG emissions consistent with the temperature goals under a combination of the effort sharing approaches. A normative method will determine coherent national mitigation targets under a combination of equity approaches. This quantitative hybrid approach adopts the distributive nature of bottom-up approach with the stringency of a top-down approach