Dr Alexandre Koberle

Summary

Dr Alexandre Köberle is an Advanced Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. His research focuses on long-term scenarios of socio-environmental change, with special focus on nexus approaches to explore transitions to alternative sustainable development futures. His interdisciplinary work uses mathematical models to develop plausible scenarios useful for stakeholders to not only enable the transition but also to identify risks and opportunities for improved human welfare and environmental sustainability. He is particularly interested in transformative systems approaches exploring nexuses across sectors and disciplines such as nature-food-finance or climate-land-energy-water and emerging trade-offs and synergies with sustainable and inclusive development objectives.

At Grantham, Dr Köberle leads several projects on the nexus of nature, climate, food, land, energy, and finance. He is Principal Investigator of the recently awarded FiNaClim-SD project funded by NERC and Finance for Biodiversity exploring transition pathways to net-zero/nature-positive futures in the context of sustainable development. He is also Principal Investigator of the Brazil Study for the Food Systems Economics Commission (FSEC) examining sustainability transitions in Brazilian agriculture through modelled scenarios and trends analysis. He is also a Co-Investigator in PARIS REINFORCE, a Horizon 2020 project looking at low-carbon pathways involving a consortium of international research institutions and in the Met Office collaboration “Changing Courses”, as well as a guest researcher in the H2020 project NAVIGATE. He led the project Flow of Capital for Climate Action (FlowCCA) examining the barriers to low-carbon investments in developing countries and solutions to unlock required flows to meet Paris Agreement objectives.

Dr Köberle is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment (CCFI) at Imperial Business School where he leads the Natural Capital research workstream, contributes to climate- and nature-related transition and physical risks, and has been the lead author on several reports exploring various risk transmission channels and analysis frameworks. His recent CCFI reports explored transition risks to coal-dependent firms in India, the impacts of extreme events on near-term risks to agriculture, and the role of nature-based solutions in the quest for low-carbon and climate-resilient agriculture.

Before joining Imperial College, Dr Köberle was at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he participated in the ongoing CD-LINKS and COMMIT international projects. At Imperial, he is currently adding to the development of the TIAM-Grantham model through the implementation of the agricultural and land use sectors to better represent land-energy interactions. Dr Köberle is a Lead Author in UNEP’s 6^th Global Environment Outlook (GEO6), a Contributing Author on UNEP’s Gap Report, and a Lead Author for the IPCC’s 6^th Assessment Report.

He has published on a variety of topics involving energy, climate mitigation, climate policy, food systems transitions, local air pollution, regional energy integration, land use and deforestation in Brazil and Latin America, bioenergy, global solar potential, energy access, and investment cost of large energy projects.

Dr Köberle holds a DSc in Energy Planning from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a Master’s degree cum laude in Environment and Resource Management from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a BSc in Plant Biology and Ecology from the University of California, Davis. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and has spent time at similar places such as IIASA and PBL.

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