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Yee Van is a Senior Researcher in Digitalisation, Circular Economy and Net Zero in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow (Environmental Change) at Reuben College.

Yee Van’s research focuses on assessing the environmental and climate impacts of resource, waste, and energy systems using system-level quantitative analysis. Her work supports data-driven decision-making for climate change mitigation and circular economy transitions, drawing on life cycle assessment, optimisation, and scenario modelling across scales from individual technologies to global systems. More recent research extends this work to examine the role of digitalisation and its wider systemic effects.

She is currently involved in the CircEUlar project, assessing the role of digitalisation as an enabler of net-zero and circular economy targets by modelling future pathways. This includes projecting potential future direct impacts, which represent one of the important preconditions for digitalisation/AI as an enabler. She is also a co-investigator on the forthcoming NetDRIVE Community Project, REACT (Recommendations for Enhancing Adoption of Carbon Footprint Tools). Yee Van gives talks on her research, some of which are online, including Oxford Energy Network Seminar and OIES Podcast.

Alongside her work on digitalisation, a substantial body of her work focuses on the solid waste management sector, examining optimal treatment strategies, resource recovery pathways, and long-term greenhouse gas emissions. This research spans micro- to macro-scale analyses and integrates demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioural drivers to better understand how system-level changes influence emissions trajectories.

Her research is accompanied by exploratory dataset dashboards on worldwide trends in digital transformation and the solid waste sector.

She is a contributor to a textbook and a handbook chapter on process integration, and serves as an associate editor of Journal of Cleaner Production (Elsevier) and Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy (Springer).

See a full list of Yee Van’s publications on Google Scholar

Publications

Fan, Y. (2024) “Digital integration for clean technologies: sustainability and policy implications”, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 26(9), pp. 2753–2754.
Bencekri, M. et al. (2024) “Locating carbon neutral mobility hubs using artificial intelligence techniques”, Scientific Reports, 14(1).
Sun, X. et al. (2024) “Towards decoupling in chemical industry: Input substitution impacted by technological progress”, Journal of Cleaner Production, 452, p. 142040.
Hoy, Z. et al. (2023) “Curbing global solid waste emissions toward net-zero warming futures”, Science, 382(6672), pp. 797–800.
Jiang, P. et al. (2023) “Blockchain technology applications in waste management: Overview, challenges and opportunities”, Journal of Cleaner Production, 421, p. 138466.
Klemeš, J. et al. (2023) Sustainable process integration and intensification: Saving energy, water and resources, pp. 1–378.
Chin, M. et al. (2023) “Developing a sustainability solid waste treatment portfolio for 3Ps (planet-prosperity-people) nexus”, Journal of Cleaner Production, 415, p. 137698.
Aviso, K. et al. (2023) “Optimizing plastics recycling networks”, Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 14, p. 100632.
Van Fan, Y. et al. (2023) “Life cycle assessment of plastic packaging recycling embedded with responsibility distribution as driver for environmental mitigation”, Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy, 31, pp. 100946–100946.
Hren, R. et al. (2023) “Hydrogen production, storage and transport for renewable energy and chemicals: An environmental footprint assessment”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 173, pp. 113113–113113.