An environmental social scientist explores human migration in a warming world

As told to Beth Jensen

I think it’s fair to say I’m obsessed about environmental issues and climate change.

I can pinpoint the beginning of all that to a high school project in my hometown of Rennes, which is a mid-size town in Brittany in western France.

I was studying hurricanes, and how their strength was expected to increase along with climate change. I was fascinated by the idea that climate change was going to be driving events like this at a global scale. 

At first, I thought the only way I’d be able to participate would be by becoming an engineer and working in energy technology. France, particularly at that time, was a very technocratic society, and policy decisions on energy were very top down.

My perspective changed during my first professional experience after college working at the French Embassy in Berlin, when Germany was launching its huge renewable energy transition plan and phasing out nuclear power following the Fukushima accident in Japan. Later, I worked as a research analyst for the scientific advisory group to the French negotiation team for the Paris Agreement, where I saw how the scientific, policy, and political communities interacted. 

Both these experiences made me realize I wanted to learn more about the policy and political questions surrounding climate change, so I decided to get my PhD in policy. Because I wanted to work at the international level and thought it made sense to not have all my degrees from my home country, I came to the U.S.

I began my PhD in 2016, shortly after hundreds of thousands of migrants began arriving in Europe after fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Europe at the time saw itself as largely preserved from the impacts of climate change, but some people tried to raise awareness of the issue by claiming that future climate migration would resemble that 2015 refugee crisis. I felt this comparison had problematic undertones and may not be accurate. I wanted to dig deeper, so I started adding migration to my research.

Much of my research today focuses on the question of how climate affects migration and how climate change is expected to impact it in the future. I also try to understand to what extent what we observe today can inform our expectation for the coming years and decades as climate change increases, as well as what we should do about it from an international policy perspective. 

I’m excited to be at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, where I hope to interact with faculty from different disciplines working on these issues. Solving these problems will require public support for large-scale change, and that’s why I’m so excited to have collaborators who are helping us understand how groups and societies can become willing and able to switch behavior in consequential ways. 

These are huge challenges, but I have hope we can achieve a lot. There’s so much to change that it opens the possibility of discussions on a wide range of issues, and there’s always a lot of potential in the synergies found in those conversations.

Related: Hélène Benveniste, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Sciences