by Louisa Hann

There’s no doubt we’re living through an urgent chapter of the climate crisis. With 2024 now confirmed the hottest year on record – recording a sobering global average temperature of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – things are only set to get hotter. A recent World Meteorological Organization report posits an 80% chance of at least one of the next five years exceeding 2024’s record, as well as a 70% chance that the five-year average warming for 2025-29 will exceed 1.5°C. With every fraction of a degree driving additional heatwaves, flooding events, droughts, ocean heating, and rising sea levels, the challenges facing decision-makers, academics, and civil society more broadly have never been greater.

So, how are GDI academics putting their interdisciplinary expertise into practice to grasp and address such challenges?  We’ve collated some of the key themes to have emerged in recent months, as well as some handy reading lists to help you explore the topic in depth.

Supporting climate justice in urban areas

As the world warms up, urban areas around the world will face increasing pressure to protect critical infrastructure from adverse weather events, support populations’ health, wellbeing and nutrition, and minimise greenhouse gas emissions. As a recent report by the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) explains, African cities are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, raising vital questions about global environmental justice. High numbers of informal settlements that lack risk-reducing infrastructure leave many residents exposed to climate-related risks such as heatwaves and flooding events. At the same time, climate change is affecting production within the agricultural and fishery sectors, with major implications for food security and nutrition.

Drawing on research in 12 cities, the ACRC team – including GDI academics, research institutions, civil society organisations, and community-based researchers – identify poverty alleviation through local job creation as a critical step to reducing climate vulnerability while boosting labour productivity. As the report summary explains, “the nexus between incremental housing production, building materials and the local employment and skills development of youth presents a significant opportunity, offering considerable potential for upscaled training and education in environmentally friendly, energy-efficient and climate-resilient housing construction which is both decent and affordable.” Achieving such goals will require the maintenance of coalitions that advocate and lobby for the informal sector, as well as access to finance that can improve neighbourhoods and upgrade infrastructure.

Another GDI researcher exploring the impact of climate change on cities is José Antonio Puppim De Oliveira, who is involved in writing the IPCC’s upcoming Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, which will track the impacts and risks of climate change in cities, as well as generate potential solutions policymakers can use to help cities adapt to new challenges. As explained in a recent blog interview, the report authors hail from a very diverse range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, including scientists, development practitioners, sociologists, and more.

By putting these experts in conversation, the report will cover intersecting issues such as finance, technology, and governance. Set for publication in 2027, this important document will provide crucial knowledge for policymakers and other parties responsible for keeping cities safe during our unstable and fragile era.

Further resources:

• ‘Plural climate storylines to foster just urban futures’ by Maria Rusca et al. – An article that explores how a new knowledge-sharing framework can generate storylines with the potential to advance policies that work towards climate-just futures.
• ‘Cities and climate change in developing countries’ by José Antonio Puppim De Oliveira and Shahjahan Bhuiyan – A broad look at the various challenges climate change presents to cities, as well as examples of responses and solutions.
• ‘Infrastructuring zoonoses: Zoonoses, infrastructures, and the life giving and taking politics of pandemic prevention’ by Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio – An article analysing the impacts of infrastructure development on the trajectory of zoonotic diseases, which are likely to emerge at increasingly higher rates as climate change intensifies.

 

Balancing immediate economic concerns with long-term sustainability

We live in a politically volatile age, as factors including rising inequality, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and a chaotic media environment deepen divisions and fuel the rise of nationalist populisms. Such factors are deeply connected, indicating that the global economic status quo isn’t fit for purpose. According to the latest UNDP Human Development Report, for example, the progress of human development is experiencing an unprecedented slowdown. Citizens across much of the world are facing declining living standards and decreasing job and housing security, all while the richest 1% emit more carbon emissions than the poorest two thirds of the world’s population and catalyse ecological crises. Something has got to give.

Of course, while immediate threats to economic growth and rash trade wars represent a real threat to people’s lives and wellbeing, especially in the global South, the long-term viability of a capitalist system in thrall to limitless growth and rapacious resource consumption has also become a crucial topic of debate. As GDI’s Bina Agarwal and co-authors explain in a paper for Nature Sustainability, the transformation of economic systems is widely regarded as vital and urgent for humanity to have any chance of tackling interacting global crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity. Mainstream economists have historically failed to reckon with the biophysical limitations of the world economy, instead zoning in on the merits of GDP growth and consumer affluence. However, with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warning of “collective suicide” if we continue along our present path, an increasing number of heterodox economic thinkers are proposing new social-economic paradigms.

Such proposals come in many shapes, ranging from degrowth models that scale back global production and consumption to so-called circular economy perspectives that advocate decoupling growth from its environmental impacts. As Agarwal and colleagues explain, while these new economic approaches could provide transformative frameworks for change, they “remain diffuse, collectively lacking sufficient discursive coherence and definition to effectively challenge conventional thinking”. A potential solution, the authors suggest, lies in the development of so-called ‘discourse coalitions’, wherein advocates for disparate economic approaches make connections across differences, learning from each other and producing meaningful interventions.

The paper identifies ten key principles that run through new economic approaches – including recognising limits to growth and working towards post-capitalism – noting that more research is required to understand their barriers to implementation. Indeed, “the importance of such work cannot be overstated, because unless the ideas summarized in the ten principles are rapidly embedded in global and national institutions, humanity is unlike to overcome the extreme crises it is facing”. Given the complex interaction of social, political, and environmental factors that will impact the viability of the ten principles, the case for interdisciplinary approaches is clear.

Further resources

• ‘Climate threat and price stability: A case study of Belize’ by Osman Ouattara and co-authors – A paper analysing how climate change is driving inflation in Belize, as well as its wider macroeconomic implications.
• ‘Deindustrialisation and the politics of subordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina’ by Seth Schindler and co-authors – An article on the politics of degrowth as a potential solution to the climate crisis, exploring what the politics of degrowth might actually look like for cities in middle-income countries.
• ‘Opinion: It’s time to transform the economics curriculum’ by Sammi Dé – A blog outlining a GDI undergraduate’s criticisms of mainstream economic pedagogies.

 

Grasping the social and environmental trade-offs associated with sustainability projects

The practice of reforestation has hit the headlines in recent years thanks to its potential to stabilise ecosystems, mitigate biodiversity loss, and potentially promote carbon sequestration. However, the social impacts of reforestation have traditionally been overlooked in both scientific research and the wider policymaking world.

This is where GDI’s Sustainable Forest Transitions (SFT) project comes in. As the group explains in a recent paper outlining their model, decades of research on forest livelihoods and governance have shown the complex interactions and interdependencies between people, forests, and governance institutions. However, much of this research has been limited to local case studies or cross-sectional research.

Now, the authors emphasise, greater availability of high-resolution, longitudinal environmental and social data, along with improved methodological tools, will allow researchers to build on existing work and generate a more comprehensive understanding of how forest interventions can best protect the environment while sustaining the livelihoods of millions across the world. For example, a recent paper showed that Indigenous Territories in the Brazilian Amazon reduced deforestation relative to all alternative land uses by up to 83%, but had smaller socioeconomic benefits than other protection types and land uses. As such, Indigenous communities experienced significant socioeconomic trade-offs. As the project develops, the team will use state-of-the-art statistical methods to highlight other trade-offs, as well as potential options for improving both forest cover and human development.

Further resources

• Just Earth Observation for Conservation project – This major project headed up by Rose Pritchard and Tim Foster explores the potential social justice risks associated with increased use of earth observation technologies in conservation. It asks whether the benefits of surveillance technologies such as drones are potentially countered by potential harms to those living in conservation landscapes.
• ‘Tradeoff optimization of urban roof systems oriented to food-water-energy nexus’ by José Antonio Puppim De Oliveira and co-authors – Explores urban roof development as a potential solution to food, water, and energy challenges in urban regions, a well as potential conflicts and trade-offs regarding resource use and other factors.
• ‘Sustainable Forest Transitions: In conversation with Dr Sreeja Jaiswal’ – A podcast episode discussing challenges associated with forest restoration efforts and debates surrounding mitigation measures such as carbon offsets.

 

Understanding the political and economic impacts of green energy transitions

Given what we know about the harms of burning fossil fuels, you might be forgiven for considering the theoretical ‘just energy transition’ to be an unalloyed good. First conceptualised by North American labour unions in the 1970s as a way to mitigate the potential for new environmental standards to negatively workers’ rights and security, the term is now widely adopted to describe policies and discussions that address the social impacts of moving away from fossil fuels.

However, while this idea has become common-sensical for many working in climate policy and advocacy, its widespread adoption and relatively loose conceptualisation raise questions about what kinds of injustices ‘just transitions’ are targeting. According to a recent paper from GDI’s Pritish Behuria, the ‘just transition’ discourse tends to overlook production-based inequities, focusing instead on labour inequities, loss of land, and domestic social movements.

While European, North American, and East Asian renewable energy firms dominate manufacturing and patenting, African countries tend to export raw materials and import manufactured green technologies, compounding their extant dependencies and limiting economic autonomy. In a world where industrialised countries have already consumed a vast proportion of the world’s carbon budget, the side-lining of production-based inequities remains a significant barrier to redressing this injustice.

Further resources

• ‘Capturing the disruptive nature of green energy transitions: A political economy approach’ by Sandra Jazmin Barragan-Contreras, Matthew Paterson, James Jackon, Silke Trommer, Pritish Behuria, and Sam Hickey – A paper that works to develop a new analytical framework for understanding the disruptive dynamics of green energy transitions.
• ‘Industrial Policy and Energy Transition amidst Geoeconomic Restructuring’ – A podcast episode by the Second Cold War Observatory discussing the limits and potential counterforces to green industrial policy in the context of contemporary geoeconomic rivalries.
• A Research Agenda for Economic Geography: Reframing 21st Century Capitalism by Yuko Aoyama, Daniel Haberly, Rory Horner, and Seth Schindler – A collection of articles analysing the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism as it faces up to intersecting and growing global crises.

 

Learn more about how GDI academics are analysing our changing world

The research presented in this blog comprises a small snapshot of the exciting work going on within GDI. If you’re keen read more research outputs, visit the GDI website or search publications in Research Explorer. You can also keep track of the latest updates from the institute via Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky. If you haven’t done so already, we recommend signing up to our newsletter to receive monthly updates and commentary.

Top image by Katie Rodriguez on Unsplash

Note:  This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.

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