Gabriela Iacobuţă is an SEI Affiliated Researcher. Her area of expertise focuses on climate change and sustainable development policies. Her research and policy advise address topics such as the adoption of national climate change policies, climate negotiations and finance, climate and sustainable development interconnections, just energy transitions, the European Green Deal in international partnerships, and policy coherence for the joint implementation of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda.
In the past, Gabriela conducted research and policy advise at the German Institute of Sustainable Development (IDOS) in Germany, where she is currently an affiliated researcher. There she was part of the Klimalog project on climate policy and the SHAPE project on defining sustainable development pathways for the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As an IDOS researcher, Gabriela also worked closely with SEI in the Overcoming Incoherence and ClimEq projects on the links between climate, inequalities and the SDGs, including by co-leading the NDC-SDG Connections tool. Previous to IDOS, Gabriela was a researcher at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, where she worked in the CD-LINKS project on adoption of national climate change policies and links to the SDGs.
Gabriela obtained her doctoral degree from Wageningen University and Research on ‘Enablers of ambitious climate action: challenges and opportunities for climate and sustainable development’, for which she received the Johannes-Rau-Forschungsgemeinschaft Dissertation Prize. There, she also completed two master’s degrees in Climate Studies and Environmental Sciences, with a focus on environmental economics and environmental systems analysis, respectively. She holds a BSc in Physics with Theoretical Physics from Nottingham University, United Kingdom.
