Climate Resilient Development
How do national governments integrate climate adaptation with economic development goals? My work examines the emergence of climate resilient development as a global policy strategy, revealing how vulnerability is increasingly understood and managed through economic frameworks. This research questions whose interests are served when climate risk becomes an opportunity for capital accumulation.
Key Insights
Economization of Vulnerability
Climate vulnerability is being transformed into economic opportunities through "adaptation economies", where areas of highest climate risk become sites for fee-for-service climate interventions.
Multi-Actor Coordination
National adaptation planning processes often lack inclusive coordination mechanisms, creating obstacles to incorporating diverse community values in development decisions.
Development Pathways
Integrating IPCC perspectives on climate resilient development pathways into national planning can help align sustainable development ambitions with adaptation practice.
"Climate-changed development signals a different form of development emerging where national governments in the global South play a prominent role in controlling national economic activities through climate resilient development policy and financing interventions."— Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2023
Related Publications
Climate resilient development pathways boost inclusive national adaptation action
Read ArticleClimate-changed development: Organizing climate risk and response through an economic growth lens
Read ArticleConstructing the Adaptation economy: Climate resilient development and the economization of vulnerability
Read ArticleCaribbean Climate Governance
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean face disproportionate climate impacts despite minimal contribution to global emissions. My research in the Caribbean examines how colonial legacies, land tenure systems, and multilateral financing shape climate governance and disaster recovery in these vulnerable nations.
Key Insights
Colonial Legacies
Historical land tenure regimes dating from slavery and emancipation continue to shape contemporary disaster response and climate adaptation strategies in Caribbean SIDS.
Climate Finance Dynamics
Interactions between multilateral climate funds and national governments reveal how vulnerability is constructed and mobilized to access international financing.
Community Resilience
Traditional land ownership systems and social cohesion can provide forms of ecological restraint, now threatened by post-disaster "modernization" efforts.
Research Approach
Related Publications
Constructing the Adaptation economy: Climate resilient development and the economization of vulnerability
Read ArticleThe Resilience of Land Tenure Regimes During Hurricane Irma
Read ArticleUrban Coastal Adaptation
Coastal cities face accelerating flood risks from sea level rise and intensifying storms. My research examines how climate adaptation intersects with quality of life, public health, and community well-being,particularly as cities consider transformative strategies like managed retreat and relocation from highly vulnerable areas.
Key Insights
Quality of Life Linkages
Climate risks and adaptation actions significantly impact residents' quality of life, well-being, and public health,often overlooked by traditional risk assessments.
Gentrification & Inequality
Socioeconomic inequalities like gentrification shape which climate risks communities prioritize and which adaptation strategies they find acceptable.
Transformative Adaptation
Meaningful adaptation requires large-scale shifts in local governance, financing, and economic structures,essentially re-imagining daily life in vulnerable regions.
"Climate adaptation can be situated within broader quality of life discussions with community stakeholders to formulate transformative strategies that better align climate risk and adaptation actions with local quality of life issues."— Climate Risk Management, 2023
Macro-Adaptation Resilience Toolkit (MART)
Through CCRUN RISA, developed an innovative decision-making support toolkit designed to address tensions between economic interests and public welfare in climate adaptation policy. Piloted in Miami-Dade County, MART helps communities formulate transformative strategies that explicitly connect climate action with quality of life concerns.
Related Publications
Linking quality of life and climate change adaptation through the use of the macro-adaptation resilience toolkit
Read ArticleAt the Water's Edge: Coastal Settlement, Transformative Adaptation, and Well-Being
Read ArticleText Data Science
How do we extract meaning from large-scale bodies of climate and policy text? My work applies computational discourse analysis and text-as-data methods to examine how climate change is framed, communicated, and acted upon across different institutional and media contexts. This research bridges qualitative traditions in human geography with emerging computational approaches to trace how narratives shape (and are shaped by) policy windows, extreme events, and scientific knowledge production.
Key Insights
Discourse & Policy Windows
Extreme climate events open narrow windows for policy change, and the discursive framing of these events by media, government, and scientists determines which adaptation responses gain traction.
Scaling Urban Climate Knowledge
Computational methods , including LLM-assisted discourse analysis , enable systematic analysis of climate solutions across cities at scale, revealing patterns in how urban actors document, share, and act on climate evidence.
Mixed-Methods Integration
Combining ethnographic depth with computational breadth produces richer accounts of climate governance than either approach alone, allowing for validation across data types and scales.
Research Approach
This work draws on a range of computational and interpretive tools to analyze how climate knowledge is produced, circulated, and contested across policy and media landscapes.
Related Publications
Building and using the evidence base for urban climate action: the UCCRN City Solutions Case Study Atlas
Presents the framework of the UCCRN City Solutions Case Study Atlas and assesses metadata search filters and LLM-assisted discourse analysis as complementary tools for extracting urban climate action knowledge across user types.
Read Article