Choquette-Levy said he believes that all people have a responsibility to make this world a better place for each other and for future generations.
“Even in the most challenging times, people in each generation have been willing to sacrifice to make life a little better for the world around them,” he said. “Being in a position to explore new ideas, work with brilliant people from different academic traditions and points of view and help mentor the next generation of change makers is an amazing opportunity to contribute to a better world, and one that I am grateful for every day.”
Choquette-Levy’s passion for the intersection of environmental and social policy has been a driving force throughout his career. His current research explores the vulnerabilities of smallholder farmers, who are among the groups most impacted by climate change.
“There are billions of smallholder farmers around the world who have very few resources to manage climate change,” he said. “They are living off the land and, in some respects, are on the front lines of climate change challenges.”
While climate change is not the sole factor contributing to mass migration, its impact on food security, water availability, extreme weather events, health and economic stability is significant, he said.
“There's a lot of debate about how much recent migration waves are attributable to climate change,” Choquette-Levy said. “You can imagine in a world with two to four degrees of warming, we could see even more substantial migration shifts around the world — including populations who no longer have the capacity to move out of harm’s way.”
Choquette-Levy’s career has bridged science and policy. During an internship at the Canadian consulate in California, he worked on climate policy, including California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standards. He later worked in Calgary’s energy, oil and gas sectors, addressing sustainability and climate policy while engaging with communities on social policy issues.
“Both of these experiences made me realize how complex these issues were and made me crave having space to really think about these issues with more time and in a deeper way than what I could do in industry,” he said.
This desire, he said, led him to transition from energy systems to climate adaptation, with a focus on migration and societal responses to climate impacts.
“I think climate and policy research holds a lot of potential to make a positive impact by exploring the full implications of proposed climate solutions,” he said. “Too often, we are presented with climate ‘solutions’ without fully vetting the social, economic and environmental implications of those policies or technologies. Solutions might look great in a lab or on paper, but we sometimes forget that any positive climate solution implemented at scale will require diverse groups of people to collaborate with each other. To do that, we need trust, and I think that the models and data analysis that we do can contribute to societal trust by transparently identifying the impacts of such solutions.”
Choquette-Levy said he sees his research as highly interdisciplinary.
“I think research in climate and policy both draws from and contributes to research in many other fields,” he said. “For example, in any given project, I'm likely to use outputs from climate models to understand different environmental scenarios that a region might face, theories from psychology and behavioral sciences that give us some grounding of how diverse actors are likely to respond to emerging risks, and algorithms from mathematics and computer science to computationally represent thousands or tens of thousands of decision-makers all acting at once.”
He said the results of this work can help economists understand the full impact of climate risks, political scientists see how these risks could worsen power imbalances in societies, and engineers and agricultural scientists identify social and economic obstacles to adopting new technologies.
During his first year at Penn State, Choquette-Levy said he aims to launch a research collaboration investigating how government officials in Nepal perceive climate risks, combining data collection and computer modeling to explore synergies and tradeoffs in their approaches. Additionally, he hopes to connect with Penn State's resources to bridge his international research with how farmers and rural communities in Pennsylvania address environmental challenges, uncovering commonalities across regions.