Hélène Benveniste

Assistant Professor,

Department of Environmental Social Sciences,

Doerr School of Sustainability,

Stanford University

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from political and other social sciences to answer research questions directly relevant to international climate change policy.

Topics of my research include:

  • Climate-related Human Migration, answering questions ranging from the effect of border policy on vulnerability to climate change, to the constraining effect of climate change on people’s ability to move, to the role of migrants demographics in explaining mobility following weather-related stress.

  • Global Environmental Governance, including the role of internationally set aspirational targets in shaping countries’ actions, and conversely what to make of national pledges across varying domestic contexts; and in another line of inquiry, how to best address the climate mobility issue in the global climate change regime.

  • Politics of Decarbonization, including the drivers of public opinion support (or lack thereof) for energy policy across national contexts.

I received my Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. I previously was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, as well as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. During the Paris Agreement year, I served as research scientist and project manager of a scientific advisory group to the French climate negotiation team, focusing on assessing countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions. As part of my career in energy and climate policy prior to graduate school, I also served as deputy attaché for energy at the French Embassy in Germany.

When not obsessing over climate change, I can be found hiking in the nearest national parks or in the local movie theater.