Titles

• ASU-Conservation International Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation

Biography

Krista Kemppinen was an ASU-Conservation International postdoctoral fellow working on the role of nature in achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Her research articulates and quantifies the degree of dependence of the SDGs and associated targets on natural capital, and investigates the trade-offs between individual goals and targets. Through this research, Kemppinen aims to inform national and global scale policy interventions.

Prior to coming to ASU, Kemppinen was a PhD candidate, and before this an undergraduate student, at the University of Cambridge. The focus of her PhD thesis was to investigate the causes of past atmospheric CO₂ fluctuations by designing and executing Earth System Model experiments on the Cambridge HPC Cluster, conducting statistical analyses of the model outputs, evaluating these against observations, and building computationally cheap model surrogates. For her Bachelor’s, Kemppinen specialized in the environmental science disciplines as well as conservation and sustainable development.

Kemppinen has worked in different countries and sectors, including: the Indian Himalayas, where she looked at the impact of measures introduced to reduce water scarcity and achieve energy security; Southern Italy, where she investigated volcanic aerosol emissions; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, where she worked on ocean methane emissions. Kemppinen has native proficiency in English, French, Spanish and Finnish.

In her spare time, Kemppinen is a Carbon Pricing Evaluation Support Fellow for MIT’s Climate CoLab. She is also passionate about science communication and facilitating the exchange of scientific information. Organizations she has previously volunteered with include the Cambridge Climate and Sustainability Forum, the Wolfson Research Event and a new UK-based social networking start up aiming to advance scientific collaborations.

Education

• PhD, Geoegraphy, University of Cambridge
• BA (Honors), Geography, University of Cambridge

Expertise

• natural capital
• poverty alleviation
• biodiversity conservation
• environmental policy
• climate change
• food security
• energy security
• climate change adaptation
• climate change mitigation
• modeling and simulation
• earth systems science
• sustainable development