Emmanuel Pont

Research field(s)

PhD in progress : Assessing the population factor for climate change: from the carbon footprint of a child to the global demographic lever

Supervision : Laurent Toulemon (INED), Antonin Pottier (EHESS/CIRED)

This thesis aims to quantify the share of the population factor in greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change as well as the possibilities of action on population, from the individual scale to demographic policies. A first angle of analysis is the review of the carbon legacy proposed by Murtaugh & Schlax (2009) to address the main limitations of both the calculation and its philosophical interpretation. A second angle will focus on models linking population and emissions, with several leads: a dynamic analysis of the effects of a birth on household emissions, an evaluation of the breakdowns of emissions by age to estimate the effect of demographic changes and an analysis the effects of heterogeneity between levels of analysis in the models. A third and final angle of analysis will begin with the evaluation of the differentiated and contextualized fertility effects of different demographic policies and will conclude with a calculation of the long-term effects of these policies on emissions.