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I’m a research director at CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives), at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE). I’m also a consultant professor at AgroParisTech. I graduated in physical oceanography (1985) and crawled onto land for my PhD devoted to modelling land-atmosphere interactions (1990).

 I’m interested in how the uses we make of our Land affect the climate at local, regional and global scales, through disturbances of the energy balance and the hydrological cycle. I have contributed to demonstrate how natural vegetation dynamics have shaped climate dynamics over the past 126 000 years. Knowledge of this dynamic led me to take an interest in recent climate change, land uses that have already perturbed more than 70% of the ice-free land, and future projections. I have more recently also worked on assessing the impacts of climate change on cereal crops, in an attempt to develop climate services for agriculture.

 I have co-coordinated the Laboratory of Excellency BASC (Biodiversity, Agroecosystems, Society and Climate) over the past 8 years, where we combined knowledge on climate, agronomy, forestry, ecology and economics to improve decisions about land uses at the territorial level. I was lead author of the IPCC Special Report on ‘Climate Change and Land’ that came out august 2019. I’m a member of the French Academy of Agriculture from where I hope to build links with the decision making arena.

 My goal for the following years is to bring together my knowledge and capacities to help fasten the transition towards a sustainable world.