Climate Justice
Climate Justice is a field of research and action that reckons with anthropogenic climate change as both a driver and product of global inequality where the greatest costs of climate breakdown are felt most by those who have done least to cause climate change and have benefitted least from rising carbon emissions.
Extending across characteristics including race, gender, age, class and ability this injustice is, above all, reflected in disparities relating to prosperity, productivity and well-being between the global north and the global south.
Climate justice seeks to advance knowledge pertaining to dynamics of climate vulnerability, including the geopolitics of debt, of borders and migration and of access to basic provisions including housing, healthcare and sanitation as well as to keystone issues such as the limiting of global warming to 1.5 degrees and the development of finance for climate-related loss and damage.
It provides a critical framework for examining the political dynamics of a transition away from the fossil fuel economy, highlighting unintended consequences of change that can serve to reinforce underlying inequalities (and related climate vulnerability) in a context where, year on year, global atmospheric temperatures continue to rise with devastating effect.
Addressing the New Denialism
Addressing the New Denialism' is a research and public engagement project backed by the Open Society Foundations that aims to expose the gap between current investment in climate finance and the projected costs of climate change (and importantly, where and on whom those costs fall) and to inform policy on how to adequately resource transition in a manner that supports the advancement of racial equity.
Conflict, Biodiversity and Climate Justice in Latin America and Africa
We are a network of academics and stakeholders interested in research notions and practices of environmental justice amidst conflict, allowing us to shed light into the distribution of climate change and ecological degradation hardships in the Global South that pays attention to gender, class and ethno-racial differences.
Mobile Solutions to the Mexican Kidnapping Epidemic (MAKE)
Kidnapping in Mexico has reached epidemic proportions. The latest national victimization survey states that 79,315 people were kidnapped in Mexico in 2018. Whilst the country is now recognised as a global hotspot for this violent crime phenomenon, its effects are even deeper than the trauma delivered to many thousands of victims and their relatives. Threat of kidnapping has a wider paralysing effect on everyday life across Mexican society, creating widespread fear and anxiety. To assist those affected by kidnapping, academic experts from the Universities of Exeter and Leeds are collaborating with Mexican filmmakers to develop new approaches to raise public awareness about this crime problem and trigger new strategies to confront it by merging science with soap operas.
Following their recent three-year Newton Fund M.A.K.E. project to develop innovative tools to help ordinary Mexicans counter kidnapping, Dr. Ernesto Schwartz-Marin (University of Exeter) and Dr. Conor O’Reilly (University of Leeds) have taken this research further and co-produced a Telenovela (‘soap opera’) about kidnapping called Amor Secuestrado (‘Kidnapped Love’ in English). Funded by joint-ESRC Impact Acceleration Awards from their respective Universities, Amor Secuestrado blends academic expertise with the social justice passion of the grassroots filmmakers to push the boundaries on how academic research is communicated effectively and how it can make a real difference.
