André Lucena - Fulbright NEXUS Scholar
Home Country: Brazil
Grant Dates: 2012/2013
Dr. André Lucena is an Associate Professor at the Energy Planning Program of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include energy and environmental economics, integrated energy modeling and climate change. Dr. Lucena was born in Rio de Janeiro and graduated with a degree in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University. After graduation he entered an Environmental Planning Master’s program, where he studied the relationship between economic development and environmental quality in Brazil. As a doctoral researcher, Dr. Lucena worked with integrated energy modeling and long term energy scenario building. During this period, he had the chance to do research for public and private institutions in many energy and climate related issues, including: integrated energy planning, energy modeling, renewable energy, greenhouse gases mitigation, and climate change impact assessment and adaptation strategies for the energy sector. Dr. Lucena also worked on the Economics of Climate Change project, a comprehensive economic analysis of the climate change impacts and adaptation costs in Brazil, which included some of the top academic and research institutions in the country.In 2008-2009, Dr. Lucena received an international exchange grant to work as a visiting scholar at the International Energy Studies Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While there, he worked on a project to estimate the risk of climate change to California energy infrastructure. Since completing his doctorate, he has been working on energy and climate change related issues, teaching and advising students on Environmental and Energy Economics.
Dr. Lucena’s Fulbright NEXUS research project falls within the Sustainable Energy theme, which is directly related to his research interests. Climate change poses a two-fold challenge to energy security: there is a need to conciliate mitigation effort with the provision of affordable energy services; increased uncertainty on climate variability will affect the production of renewable energy which raises the need for adaptation measures. Since mitigation and adaptation measures are linked, understanding the interactions between them is essential to formulate optimal climate policy. The NEXUS project aims to build energy scenarios in an integrated energy modeling framework to explore the interactions between mitigation and adaptation strategies and to assist in the formulation of the country’s climate and energy policy. Also, Dr. Lucena intends to expand the use of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) for Latin America, which will be a direct result of his visiting exchange at the Joint Global Change Research Institute.