ICEM2019 Day 3 (Thursday) Plenary Talk:
The changing geopolitics of energy: the energy-climate-security nexus and the Sustainable Development Agenda. Why meteorologists might help in preserving global stability?
Yana Popkostova is the founding director of the European Centre for Energy & Geopolitics Analysis, and one of the World Energy Council’s under-35 Future Energy Leaders.
The European Centre for Energy and Geopolitical Analysis is a disruptive fusion between an energy think-do-tank and a consulting firm aiming to catalyze real leadership and meaningful cross-sectoral engagement for a sustainable, inclusive and resilient energy transition. ECEGA’s work interfaces whole-system analysis with solutions-driven policy advice to equip policy and industry executives to better exploit low-carbon energy potentials, and navigate through and thrive in a carbon-constrained and geopolitically volatile environment.
Yana’s policy interest and research explore the wide spectrum of EU Energy and Climate Policies [the design of pragmatic and scalable ecarbonisation solutions and energy governance regime], Energy Diplomacy and Geopolitics of Energy [focusing on new resource scarcity and the axis of contention
around renewable energy], as well as energy-related aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative. She is equally an all-around passionate advocate for women’s empowerment and diversity in energy (fostering gender mainstreaming of energy policy and business, tackling feminisation of energy poverty and the removal of cognitive gender biases).
Her background is in the EU Energy policy incubator, spanning institutional, business, entrepreneurial and non-for-profit service. She has previously worked on energy policy and strategy for the European Climate Foundation and before that as a Policy Advisor within the cabinet of the Vice-president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe political party, as well as within the Directorate Generale for the Presidency in the
European Parliament.
She served as an expert reviewer of the IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5 degree and sat at the advisory board for France of the UN-sponsored Women’s Entrepreneurship Day. In 2017, she was named as one of the 35-under-35 Future Energy Leaders by the World Energy Council. She was equally designated as an inaugural EUI Policy Leaders Fellow, where she run a project on the Governance of the Energy Union regulation.
Yana is trilingual and holds a post-graduate degree in European Politics with distinction from the London School of Economics. Her husband is a petroleum engineer and they raise together a confident and cheerful daughter.
