our team.

Rebecca Burdon

Rebecca Burdon

Rebecca is the CEO at Climate Resource. She has a background in economics and over 20 years of experience in policy, regulation and climate change. She has held management or board positions in university, government, commercial and not-for-profit entities. She is a Senior Advisor to Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne and was the Managing Director of the Energy Transition Hub in Australia until September 2020, also based at the University of Melbourne.

Rebecca was a General Manager at the Climate Change Authority and a member of the expert committee advising the Australian government on rules for creating carbon credits from the land sector under the Carbon Farming Initiative. Prior to that she was the Principal Economist at the Australian Communications and Media Authority, leading work on auction design for high-value radiofrequency spectrum. Rebecca has also worked at the New Zealand Treasury and as an economic consultant in Australia and the UK, delivering major projects in 10 countries. She has a Masters of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Prof. Malte Meinshausen

Prof. Malte Meinshausen

Malte is the Science Director at Climate Resource. His primary research interests and experiences relate to probabilistic climate change projections, the remaining carbon budget and international climate negotiations. Malte Meinshausen is a Professor at the University of Melbourne in Climate Science and Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on the physical climate science, as well as part of the Core Writing Team of the IPCC Synthesis Report. Malte Meinshausen was founding Director of the Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne and Co-Director of the Energy Transition Hub. Malte Meinshausen has been the scientific advisor to the German Environmental Ministry, being part of the German negotiation team at international climate change negotiations for more than 10 years. In his scientific career, he received an Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship Award and was ranked among the 50 most influential climate scientists in the world by Reuters.

Jared Lewis

Jared Lewis

Jared is the Chief Technical Officer at Climate Resource and an expert at developing solutions for processing, visualising and distributing large scientific datasets with more than ten years of experience working with climate data. He has built the underlying data tools to support the quantification of emissions reduction commitments by the science community and international organisations. Jared was a Contributing Author to the Synthesis Report as well as Chapters within Working Groups 1 and 3 for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Jared also holds a part-time position at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Dr. Zebedee Nicholls

Dr. Zebedee Nicholls

Zebedee is the Modelling Director at Climate Resource. He is a leading expert in reduced complexity climate model development. He is the only researcher to have contributed heavily to the development of both MAGICC and FaIR, the two reduced complexity climate models used for emissions scenario assessment in the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. Alongside Malte, he leads the Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project (RCMIP), which performs standardised evaluation of reduced complexity climate models. He also led the development of a common resource for reduced complexity model calibration data based on ESM output (cmip6.science.unimelb.edu.au) and helped create the input greenhouse gas datasets for CMIP6’s future scenario experiments. Before his PhD, Zebedee completed his undergraduate Masters course in Physics at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Beyond his PhD and Climate Resource work, Zebedee is also a Lead Author of the Chapter 7 Supplementary Material and Contributing Author to the Technical Summary, Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and Annex III of Working Group 1 of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report.

Dr. Johannes Gütschow

Dr. Johannes Gütschow

Johannes' main focus is on historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data and future emissions scenarios. He is the lead author of the PRIMAP-hist national historical GHG emissions dataset and has published several other open access emissions data products. He has developed a methodology to extend NDC based emissions scenarios until the end of the century in line with databases of IAM scenarios which is used to calculate end of century temperatures and associated impacts for research papers and the Climate Action Tracker. Johannes joined Climate Resource in 2022 after 9 years at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and work as a freelance scientist and scientific adviser.

Alister Self

Alister Self

Alister's research interests and expertise lie in the politics and policy of climate change at local, national and international scales. Alister holds an MSc (climate change), as well as a BSc (applied sciences). He is in the process of finishing his PhD at the University of Melbourne, which is focused on the international climate change negotiations, and in particular the evolution of the UNFCCC’s financial architecture. He is also currently the Assistant Editor at the journal Climate Policy

Dr. Mika Pflüger

Dr. Mika Pflüger

Mika specialises in developing reliable scientific software. He has extensive experience in Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Quality Assurance, and in data collection, evaluation and visualization. Before joining Climate Resource, he worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) on historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data and the integrated energy transition assessment model REMIND. Previously, Mika completed a PhD in experimental physics at the HU Berlin, while working at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany's national metrology institute. There he focused on robust uncertainty quantification for complex models. Mika is a member of the German Society of Research Software Engineers (deRSE e.V.).

Yini Lai

Yini Lai

Yini joined Climate Resource as a data quality analyst in 2023 after completing her Masters of Data Science at the University of Melbourne. She analyses and visualises data produced by Climate Resource, to support us to evaluate changes in successive updates of our data and comparisons to input sources and other comparator data sets. Yini has a Bachelor of Commerce from Monash University and a Bachelor of Management from Guangdong University of Finance.

Daniel Busch

Daniel Busch

Daniel joined Climate Resource as a data scientist in 2023. After his mechanical engineering studies at the Technical University Dresden, he built experience in scientific programming at the Reiner Lemoine Institute in Berlin. To develop a deeper understanding of environmental issues, he completed a master's in Global Change Management at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde. Before joining Climate Resource, he worked at WWF and the German Environment Agency. With his interdisciplinary background, he has worked on diverse projects ranging from renewable energy to carbon markets. Daniel is passionate about building bridges between climate action and technology to contribute to a better future for all.

Prabhashanee Jayasekara

Prabhashanee Jayasekara

Prabhashanee is working with Climate Resource as an intern, focused on sustainable finance. She is a Postgraduate student at the Melbourne Law School with a background in civil litigation. Prabhashanee is on study leave from her role at the Attorney General's Department in Sri Lanka. In that role she has negotiated settlements on behalf of state entities in relation to State lands, the exercise of administrative powers by State officials and personal injury cases, prepared submissions for trial and arbitration proceedings, and defended the State, public officials and public corporations in civil litigations.

Dr Arj Dibley

Dr Arj Dibley

Dr. Arjuna (‘Arj’) Dibley is an Associate of Climate Resource. He is the Head of the Sustainable Finance Hub, part of Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne. Climate Resource is collaborating with the Sustainable Finance Hub on a three year project. Arj joined the University after a decade of experience working on climate change and sustainable finance globally as a financial sector adviser, commercial lawyer and senior policy analyst. Arj’s research has been published in top academic journals and has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has led international reports on sustainable finance for the UN Environment Program and global development banks. Arj continues to advise financial institutions, businesses and governments on various aspects of climate change policy and sustainable finance. He holds a doctorate in climate change law and economics from Stanford University which he gained as a John Monash Scholar, and he is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development, a Board Member of CarbonPlan and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford.