On Tuesday, February 4 we hosted a fireside chat with Dr Abrar Chaudhury on “Resilience and Sustainable Finance.” Dr Chaudhury conducts research on the impact of climate change, climate finance and corporate purpose. Currently, he is on a prestigious British Academy Fellowship at the University of Oxford, investigating the ways in which dedicated climate funding and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can strengthen climate adaptation in Pakistan and other emerging economies.
The importance of researching climate action on the ground
Asked to introduce himself and present his research interest, Dr Chaudhury defined himself as a social scientist trying to understand how various actors come together to address and finance climate action. Right from the start, the speaker highlighted the need for researchers to be on the ground in the places most affected by climate change and understand the local actors. Sustainable finance can too often assume a top down perspective, which, though oftentimes necessary, risks losing vital points of view.
Climate resilience is becoming more significant, despite conceptual challenges
Abrar’s research focuses on the topics of climate resilience and climate change adaptation, that is adaptation of societies to the effects of climate change such as changes in weather patterns and increased likelihood of catastrophic events. Defining resilience is already challenging - Abrar shared that it took him more than 20 pages in the latest UNDP report to present all the competing definitions found in the literature. The notions of resilience are also evolving – from a rudimentary understanding according to which populations surviving climate impacts counts as resilience, to a more nuanced view which perceives resilience as reorganization and transformation of the political, social and physical systems in a way that is necessary to cope with the effects of climate change. Climate change adaptation also used to be considered an issue for developing countries only, but this has changed, as the recent catastrophic events such as the floods in Germany or the fires in the US demonstrate.
One key difficulty with climate resilience and mitigation is that it lacks a clear cut measurement metric, the role which GHG emissions play for climate adaptation. This of course makes it more challenging to track successes and setbacks, but also makes it potentially less attractive for financial capital, due to lack of clear KPIs. This led to climate adaptation being historically far less important than climate adaptation, including in allocation of funds under various UN mechanisms. But this has started to change, and the balance is moving from a 90/10 division of attention and funding, towards a fairer share. As Abrar stressed, the UNDP wants to create both sides of the market for climate resilience – identifying promising organization, working on the ground on climate issues, and providing them with “seed” financing to test out scalability.
Common themes in resilience and climate change adaptation action
To give more concrete examples of UNDP-funded, climate resilience projects which Abrar encountered in his work, he pointed out some common themes. A lot of UNDP-funded projects relate to agriculture in one way or another, for example through improving irrigation systems or seeds quality, projecting rainfall to address crop damages or advancements in aquaponics. At its heart, resilience means upskilling people – not giving them solutions or addressing climate impacts ex post, but giving them basic skills which make them less immune to these impacts. This approach also allows for not creating dependency.
The benefits of researchers’ practical involvement in climate action
Asked to elaborate on the role of researchers and academia in improving climate adaptation projects, Abrar stressed that on the one hand, academia has the advantage of being objective. Researchers can thus play a role of honest brokers, helping policymakers in identifying real problems and challenges and evaluating the responses. However, on the other hand, this detachment often means that academic research is not immediately useful for solving problems in the real world.
This is starting to change at the UN level, as funding for research is often explicitly tied to addressing an identified issue. Moreover, Abrar sees the approach of combining theory with on the ground work at Oxford. Oxford students at SOGE have many opportunities to participate in climate-related programmes in developing countries. Similarly, at the Saïd Business School, MBA students have a chance to participate in short-term internships at organizations working on the ground on climate resilience solutions. The business school started to offer these opportunities after students taking classes which required them to come up with a solution to a real-world problem complained that without a real-world actor, with which they could engage in a dialogue, the work felt incomplete and theoretical. This type of direct partnership between academia and the outside world is the future of education.
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