Florian Pothin
About me
I am a PhD candidate in economics at the Université de Rennes (CREM, CNRS), and I will defend my thesis on 24 November 2026. My thesis sits at the intersection of economics, finance, environmental science and data science.
I study what economic agents say they do about climate change and what they actually do. My dissertation, The Decarbonization Gap: Firms, Nations, and the Economics of the Low-Carbon Transition, asked: why do the climate commitments of firms and countries so often change what is reported more than what is emitted? I show that disclosure choices and the reallocation of production through trade move emissions on paper and across borders more than they reduce them, while a carbon price does cut them, by an amount its allocation rule decides. More broadly, I bring together the measurement of emissions, fair-share principles and economic modelling to ask how the burden of the low-carbon transition is shared.
I prepared my doctorate under an industrial research agreement with Toovalu, a company that develops carbon-accounting software, and I continue to work with the company on applied research. There, I work on implementing artificial intelligence and quantitative methods that help companies accelerate their decarbonization, and I have spent much of my time building methods to measure the environmental impact of AI systems themselves.
I am a member of the Science Based Targets initiative's expert working group on data quality, assurance and claims, and of IRIS-E, the Université de Rennes initiative on the socio-ecological transition, where I evaluate research proposals. I teach macroeconometrics and macrodynamics at master's level at the Université de Rennes.
I hold a master's degree in financial and economic engineering, with a focus on macroeconomics and finance, from the Université de Rennes (with highest honours) and a bachelor's degree in economics from the Université de La Réunion.
I am originally from Le Tampon, on Réunion Island. In my free time, I try to be outdoors as much as I can, discovering the beauty that nature has to offer.
Research
by statusDrafts available on request.
Trade shocks redraw the global carbon map but do not shrink it
Do corporate climate pledges cut emissions? Science-based targets change what firms count first
A product-level Trade-LCA framework for embodied carbon accounting in global trade
Transparency and verification in the economics of decarbonization
Is the environmental Kuznets curve identified?
Sectoral climate legislation and corporate targets
Multi-criteria environmental assessment of generative artificial intelligence services
Fair shares for firms: what the flat rate hides
Endogenous abatement as green capital in a heterogeneous-firm general equilibrium
Data and code
Every paper comes with a public package: the data it is built on, the code that produces each number, and a record of which script makes which figure or table. Licensed sources (CDP, BACI, ecoinvent through the ADEME Base Empreinte) are not redistributed; everything derived from them that a paper reports is.
| Package | Contents | DOI |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden corporate carbon footprints | code for the CDP panel, category classification, correction engine and bootstrap; derived aggregates only | 23757920 |
| Corporate climate pledges | firm-year disclosure panel, event-study designs, fixed-boundary series | 21627772 |
| Product-level Trade-LCA | embodied-carbon account by product, matching pipeline, both blind audits | 20719018 |
| Transparency and verification | 2,578-study corpus, coding protocol, reliability by dimension | 21719291 |
| Trade shocks and the carbon map | 22.4 M bilateral flows, event studies, border-tax counterfactual | 21889661 |
Teaching
≈270 h- Macrodynamics: real business cycle models
- M.Sc. IEF, Rennes · 2024–2027
- Macroeconometrics: time series
- M.Sc. IEF, Rennes · 2023–2027
- Supervised machine learning (R)
- M.Sc., IA School · 2024–2026
- Python and AI frameworks
- EPSI · 2022–2025
- Mathematics for finance
- IGEFI · 2024–2026
- Green finance
- IET · 2022–2023
- Bloomberg Terminal sessions (teaching assistant, in English)
- B.Sc. year 3, European section, Rennes · 2018–2020
- Tutored partner projects (company tutor): low-carbon practices by sector, then decarbonisation levers in retail and agri-food
- Engineering students, first year, Centrale Nantes · 2025–2026
The two Rennes courses are taught in the M.Sc. Ingénierie Économique et Financière (IEF) and total about 120 h; the business-school teaching about 150 h. Teaching in French and English.
The rest of the record
Presentations
- 12th International Macroeconomics Workshop, Macroeconomic Policy Making in Turbulent Times, CREM, Université de Rennes, 2 October 2026.
- International Economies: Challenges Ahead, Ryukoku University with Yokohama National University, Sciences Po Aix and the Aix-Marseille School of Economics, Kyoto, 28 February – 1 March 2026.
- Research workshop, Shiga University, Japan, 2026.
- 11th International Macroeconomics Workshop, International Macroeconomic Issues of Climate Change, CREM, Université de Rennes, 2025.
- SESTEF 2024, International Conference on Sustainability, Environment and Social Transition in Economics and Finance, Paris, 11–13 December 2024.
- 29th Forecasting Financial Markets Conference (FFM29), IPAG Business School, Oxford, 11–13 September 2024.
Industry: the CIFRE doctorate
The thesis was carried out with Toovalu, a company that builds carbon-accounting software; I continue to work with the company on applied research projects. Three things went back to the firm and its clients rather than only to the literature: a benchmarking tool that compares companies on corrected rather than reported numbers, an estimate of the environmental footprint of the company's own AI systems, and work on standards at the Science Based Targets initiative. The exchange ran both ways: the questions behind two chapters came from what the software could not answer.
Distinctions
- Prix Transition, Trophées Valorisation 2024, Campus Innovation, Université de Rennes, with Tovonony Razafindrabe and Fabien Rondeau, for the CIFRE CREM–Toovalu project.
- Winner, “Prédiction de sinistres” data challenge (Generali), 2018 edition, with Morgan Riou; presented at the data science seminar of Stéphane Mallat's chair, Collège de France (Annuaire du Collège de France).
Funded projects worked on
- ANR I-DAVE (2024–2027): an AI and knowledge-based framework for the reliability of life-cycle assessment, funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, with Centrale Nantes (LS2N), UTC (Roberval), Toovalu and Cetim. The grant is held by Toovalu; I carry out its work on the company's side.
- IRIS-E, Interdisciplinary Research and Innovative Solutions for Environmental transition: appointed member of the working group of axis 2, “Interdisciplinary and co-constructed research”, from December 2023 for a two-year mandate, evaluating project proposals and taking part in funding decisions. IRIS-E is a winner of the national “ExcellencES” call of the French investment-for-the-future programme.
Service and expertise
Member, Science Based Targets initiative Expert Working Group on Data Quality Assurance and Claims.
Education and training
PhD in economics, Université de Rennes, 2023–2026. M.Sc. Financial and Economic Engineering, Université de Rennes, 2018–2020, with honours. B.Sc. Economics, Université de La Réunion, 2015–2018. “Tools for Macroeconomics” summer school, London School of Economics, 2025. Doctoral module in scientific computing and data science, Collège doctoral de Bretagne, 20 hours.
Methods and tools
Econometrics and causal inference on panel data (event studies, staggered designs, randomization inference), machine and deep learning for measurement, structural general-equilibrium modelling, life-cycle and input–output accounting. Python (pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch), R, Matlab, Dynare, SQL, Git, LaTeX, HPC clusters. French (native), English (research and teaching), German (basic), Japanese (A1).