Hermine Van Coppenolle
@herminevc.bsky.social
180 followers 440 following 15 posts
PhD in political science at Ghent University, (climate) nerd, observer, thinks a lot about the 2015 Paris Agreement. 🏳️‍🌈
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
unep.org
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.
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
climate-policy.bsky.social
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 ⬇️
The Power of Peers: a spatial analysis of nationally determined contributions
www.tandfonline.com
herminevc.bsky.social
Thank you @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social for making this research possible
herminevc.bsky.social
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.
herminevc.bsky.social
Congratulations! Welcome to Bluesky
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
janagheuens.bsky.social
🔥 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 👇
www.greendealnet.eu
herminevc.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
michellehaas.bsky.social
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...
herminevc.bsky.social
Congratulations! Tremendously well-deserved 🎉
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
greendealnet.eu
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...
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
carolinebertram.bsky.social
🌎🌡️ 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) 👇
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
janagheuens.bsky.social
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!
greendealnet.eu
🌍What’s next for global climate governance after COP29?

Join our roundtable w/ @oberthuerseb.bsky.social to discuss COP29 outcomes, the future of climate action, international climate finance & the role of non-state actors in tackling the global climate crisis 👉 www.greendealnet.eu/Reflections-...
herminevc.bsky.social
This provision is therefore another tool in the #climate toolbox. Time will tell if/how consequential it may be.
herminevc.bsky.social
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.
herminevc.bsky.social
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.
herminevc.bsky.social
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
herminevc.bsky.social
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!
herminevc.bsky.social
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.
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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. 🧵
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
ryankatzrosene.bsky.social
👂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!
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
plehmann.bsky.social
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.
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...
www.tandfonline.com
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
ketanjoshi.co
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…
Reposted by Hermine Van Coppenolle
jfmorin.bsky.social
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