Stephanie Cortinovis is a PhD student in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research interests include global climate governance, low-carbon transitions, environmental ethics, and, most prominently, the implications of negative emissions technologies within those domains. She is currently a Contributing Author for a chapter of the next Assessment Report (AR7 Working Group III) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In her PhD, she intends to apply strategies for decision-making under deep uncertainty to understand emerging global carbon management regimes and means of governing the scale-up of negative emissions technologies. Specifically, she is using the Cross-Impact Balance analysis technique to develop quasi-quantitative scenarios that characterize future outcomes related to ocean alkalinity enhancement techniques for marine carbon dioxide removal, from an interdisciplinary, systems-focused perspective.

She obtained an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Peace, Conflict, and Justice Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Stephanie completed her master’s in Sustainability Management at the University of Waterloo in 2023. Her master’s research focused on the pathways for scaling up direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) technologies, as well as the existing and nascent systems of infrastructure and policy for governing them in Canada. As a member of the Waterloo Climate Intervention Strategies Lab (WatCISL), her research continues to help inform a multi-year research project funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada entitled “Robust decision making using dynamic adaptive policy pathways for direct air capture deployment in Canada.”