CSO members of the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility
François Gemenne is a professor at HEC Paris, where he is the academic director of the Master in Sustainability and Social Innovation. A specialist of environmental geopolitics and migration governance, he is also a FNRS senior research associate at the University of Liège (Belgium), where he heads the Hugo Observatory, a research lab on environmental changes and migration. He is also the co-director of the Observatory on Defence and Climate of the French Ministry of Defence, jointly with Mathilde Jourde at IRIS. He was a lead author for the 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC and lectures on climate change and migration policies in different universities, including Sciences Po and Sorbonne University in Paris. Recently, he has founded the Alliance for the Decarbonization of Road Transport, a large consortium of 100+ companies and municipalities.
His research deals mostly with environmental and migration governance. He has worked in particular on populations displaced by environmental changes and the policies of adaptation to climate change, as well as on asylum and migration policies.
He is also the director of the Politics of the Earth series at Presses de Sciences Po, a leading French academic publisher, and is involved in several NGOs and think-tanks. In particular, he is the president of the Scientific Council of Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme, a major environmental NGO in France, as well the President of the Board of the Sustainable Finance Observatory, as well as of the NGO Climate Voices, which seeks to connect youth from the global North and the global South around climate issues.
In recent years, he has been coordinating two important European research projects: MAGYC, on migration governance and asylum crises, as well as HABITABLE, on migration induced by climate change. He also coordinated the DEVAST project, one of the first international projects to examine the social and political consequences of the Fukushima disaster. Furthermore, he has been involved in a large number of international research projects on migration and environmental changes, including EACH-FOR, HELIX, EDGE, MISTY and MECLEP, for which he was the global research coordinator.
In 2015, he was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to pursue research at Princeton University. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Economics in Bratislava, and has spent research stays at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the University of the South Pacific in Suva (Fiji) and the Australian National University in Canberra.
He holds a joint doctorate in political science from Sciences Po Paris and the University of Liege (Belgium). He also holds a Master’s degree in Development, Environment and Societies from the University of Louvain, as well as a Master of Research in Political Science from the London School of Economics, where he also taught. In 2008, he was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship from the AXA Research Fund. He has published in leading journals, including Science and Global Environmental Change, and has authored several books, amongst which ‘The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis’ (edited with C. Hamilton and C. Bonneuil, Routledge 2015) the Atlas of Environmental Migration (with D. Ionesco et D. Mokhnacheva, Routledge 2016) or Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration (edited with R. McLeman, Routledge 2018).
