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Hermine Van Coppenolle

@herminevc.bsky.social
188 followers 450 following 15 posts

Postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. PhD in political science from Ghent University. (Climate) Nerd, observer, thinks a lot about the 2015 Paris Agreement. 🏳️‍🌈

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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
UN Environment Programme @unep.org · 19/09/2025
Waste is piling up, harming people and the planet. Our Waste Pollution 101 interactive shows where it comes from, what it does, and how we can fix it. Explore the solutions and join the effort to #BeatWastePollution: www.unep.org/interactives...
Collage illustration on a dark background showing waste items including a slice of pizza, a T-shirt, a cow, a fish, a plastic bottle, a coffee cup, a smartphone, a TV, a pill bottle, and construction machinery. Blue outline of the Earth in the background. Text overlay reads: ‘Waste Pollution 101. A primer on how unsustainable production and consumption habits have escalated the waste pollution crisis.’ UNEP logo in the corner.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
What a match
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Climate Policy Journal @climate-policy.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
A country's NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) ambition is influenced by the ambition levels of its peers, finds ‪@herminevc.bsky.social. #Climate ambition converges among peer countries based on democracy levels, regional location and geopolitical affinity 👫 Read more ⬇️
tandfonline.com
The Power of Peers: a spatial analysis of nationally determined contributions
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Thank you @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social for making this research possible
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
I'm very happy to see my paper on peer groups and climate ambition published in @climate-policy.bsky.social I analysed whether there is a relationship between a country's NDC ambition, and the ambition levels of its peers. (spoilers: there are some!) doi.org/10.1080/1469...
Image of the first page of the article, with the title: 'The Power of Peers: A spatial analysis of nationally determined contributions'
Abstract: The Paris Agreement’s pledge and review process was designed to ramp up climate ambition through norm-setting and repeated interactions. Yet this peer influence dynamic remains underexplored in analyses of the determinants of climate ambition. To address this gap, this paper examines whether the climate ambition of peer countries can explain climate ambition in subsequent rounds of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This paper builds on and contributes to research on the Paris Agreement, the drivers of climate ambition, and the broader literature on soft governance. Using spatial regression models, the analysis incorporates peer pressure into spatial lags of first-round NDC ambition to assess patterns of convergence and divergence in the second round of NDCs. The results show that climate ambition for peer groups with high geopolitical affinity, similar levels of democracy, and regional similarity converges, while countries with similar income levels exhibit diverging ambition trends. These results underscore the interdependent nature of climate ambition and suggest that leveraging peer networks could enhance global climate cooperation under the Paris Agreement.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Congratulations! Welcome to Bluesky
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Jana Gheuens @janagheuens.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
🔥 New How Green Is Your Deal? episode out! 🎙️ @earsomj.bsky.social and @franziskapetri.bsky.social discuss how EU climate leadership and climate diplomacy might be affected by geopolitical shifts and the new Trump Presidency Available on Spotify and Apple Podcast - even with video! Links 👇
greendealnet.eu
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
I have all of my notes and to-do lists in Obsidian. I’ve been using it for about 3 years now and I’m very pleased It’s very customisable
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Michelle Haas @michellehaas.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
Are you interested in following updates of research on international and European studies? GIES (Ghent University) just joined BlueSky: @giesugent.bsky.social ! Find out more about the team of researchers at: www.ugent.be/ps/politieke...
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Congratulations! Tremendously well-deserved 🎉
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
GreenDeal-NET @greendealnet.eu · 13/01/2025
Can EU trade agreements bolster climate action? @carolinebertram.bsky.social & @herminevc.bsky.social examine how commitments to effectively implement the Paris Agreement raise costs,strengthen duties &foster ambition. Will dispute settlement mechanisms deliver?👉 www.greendealnet.eu/Strengthenin...
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Caroline Bertram @carolinebertram.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
🌎🌡️ Big news: The EU-Mercosur trade agreement was finalised yesterday—despite pushback from member states and environmentalists 🌱 @herminevc.bsky.social & I have just published research on the legally binding commitment to effectively implement the Paris Agreement present herein (1/4) 👇
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Jana Gheuens @janagheuens.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
What to make of COP29? Join this excellent roundtable to get a better understanding of COP29 outcomes and what they mean for tackling the climate crisis!
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
This provision is therefore another tool in the #climate toolbox. Time will tell if/how consequential it may be.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
The important caveat is this, however: you can see the linkage in terms of "legal potential": The commitment CAN play a role in strengthening the Paris Agreement, but fulfilling this potential is conditional on actual political backing.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
This is especially so for the most recent agreements: the commitment itself has evolved from a non-binding statement of shared intent in the trade agreements with Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam into a legally binding obligation in the EU-United Kingdom, EU-Kenya, and EU-New Zealand trade agreements.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
It is now more costly to withdraw from the Agreement. The linkage also strengthens their procedural duties such as submitting timely climate plans (NDCs), the expectation that they increase their climate ambition, and the expectation that perties implement NDCs to their best efforts
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
We set out to investigate what this means: what are the obligations under the Paris Agreement and does this linkage make a difference for the involved trade partners? We argue that it does make a difference, though with an important caveat!
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Since 2019, EU trade agreements have included a commitment to "effectively implement the Paris Agreement" in their trade and sustainability chapters. Including ongoing negotiations, 14 trade agreements will commit the EU and its trade partners - 45 countries in total - to this clause.
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Caroline Bertram and I just published a new paper! In this open access article, we explore the role of EU trade agreements in bolstering the Paris Agreement's obligations (a wordy🧵) link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Strengthening the Paris Agreement through trade? The potential and limitations of EU preferential trade agreements for climate governance - International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Ec...
Since 2019, a commitment has been included in the European Union’s (EU) preferential trade agreements to effectively implement the Paris Agreement. This commitment now exists in nine ratified or pendi...
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
1. Here's why I'll never use AI to assist my research or writing: A. I don't want to know exactly what I'm looking for. I mean that when I start researching a topic, I want to remain open to its contradictions and paradoxes, and to the unexpected paths that might lead off it. 🧵
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Ryan Katz-Rosene, PhD @ryankatzrosene.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
👂what's that? You want to start your week with a thread about how the Jevons Paradox is often misused to imply that technological innovations will necessarily result in greater environmental damage? I got you covered! THREAD!
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Paul Lehmann @plehmann.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Highlighting the efficacy and revenue recycling potential of carbon pricing increases support, especially in emerging market economies. Moreover, people adopt more negative views of subsidies for renewable energy and low-carbon technologies when the salience of their costs is increased.
tandfonline.com
Does information change public support for climate mitigation policies?
Carbon pricing policies can play an important role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, policymakers often cite the lack of public support as a major obstacle to adopting and expan...
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 17/11/2024
nice paragraph on environmental impacts in this! It is the aggressive, panicked and wide-eyed force-injection of chatbots into literally everything that is driving the ballooning energy depravity of this technology.
3.2. Worrying environmental impacts
The emphasis on scale in AI also comes with consequences
to the planet, since training and deploying AI models requires raw materials for manufacturing computing hardware, energy to power infrastructure, and water to cool evergrowing datacenters. The energy consumption and carbon
footprint of AI models has grown with models such as LLMs
emitting up to 550 tonnes of CO2 during their training process (Strubell et al., 2019; Luccioni & Hernandez-Garcia,
2023; Luccioni et al., 2022) . But the most serious sustainability concerns relate to inference, given the speed at which
AI models are being deployed in user-facing applications.
It is hard to gather meaningful data regarding both the energy cost and carbon emissions of AI inference because this
varies widely depending on the deployment choices made
(e.g. type of GPU used, batch size, precision, etc.). However, high-level estimates from Meta attribute approximately
one-third of their AI-related carbon footprint to model inference (Wu et al., 2021), whereas Google attributes 60%
of its AI-related energy use to inference (Patterson et al.,
2022). Comparing estimates of the energy required for inference for LLMs (Luccioni et al., 2024) to ChatGPT’s 10
million users per day (Oremus, 2023) reveals that within a
few weeks of commercial use, the energy use of inference
overtakes that of training. Given the many companies and
investors working to make AI more ubiquitous, these numbers could go up by many orders of magnitude. In fact, we
are already seeing chatbots applied in consumer electronics
such as smart speakers and TVs, as well as appliances such
as refrigerators and ovens. The increased use of AI in userfacing products is putting tech companies’ climate targets at
text classification
question answering
fill text mask
token classification
image classification
object detection
text generation
summarization
image captioning
image generation
task
1mWh
10mWh
100mWh
1Wh
10Wh
Energy used
fo…
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Jean-Frédéric Morin @jfmorin.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
As many of us are moving to this platform, I've created a list of researchers active in global environmental governance. It might be a useful starting point, and I'll continue adding to it as I discover more go.bsky.app/7sZRvzU
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Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 14/11/2024
Time for the @bsky.app community to see one of my favorite visualizations of climate change... "Shifting Distribution of Land Temperature Anomalies" by svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5211/ ⚒️🧪
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Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
Glen Peters @glenpeters.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
What is causing the atmospheric CO2 concentration to growth (light blue bars)? It is all the fossil CO2 emissions (brown) we dump into the atmosphere (a little LUC too), with the land (green) & ocean (dark blue) sinks struggling to keep up. More figures: robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2024/
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
As a taste, here is my first (open access) article on the norm origins and diffusion of net zero: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... It highlights the role of transnational advocacy groups and the IPCC in formulating and spreading norms like net zero
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Reframing the climate debate: The origins and diffusion of net zero pledges
Achieving net zero emissions has rapidly become the dominant long-term objective guiding national climate policies. At the end of 2018, only 24 countries were considering or had adopted long-term net....
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Hermine Van Coppenolle @herminevc.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
Finally jumping ship in search of a new algorithm! I'm a PhD researcher working on global climate governance, the Paris Agreement, and climate ambition. Looking forward to follow anyone working on climate, politics, or science communication in general!
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