ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE & ENERGY
Rethinking climate policy from the ground up
Areas of focus
Climate change is not a distant threat: it is a present reality reshaping economies, migration patterns, and geopolitics, and its costs fall unevenly across the world. HDRI's Environment, Climate Change & Energy team examines this imbalance directly, analyzing how the impacts of a warming planet diverge between the Global North and the Global South, and what that divergence means for questions of responsibility, adaptation, and justice.
Our research interrogates the climate justice movement itself: where it has shifted policy and public consciousness, where its ambitions have outpaced its results, and what a more effective, more equitable model of climate action could look like. From energy transition policy to biodiversity and urban ecology, this thematic area combines rigorous environmental analysis with a clear-eyed assessment of the politics that determine whether good policy actually gets implemented.
Global North–South disparities in climate impact, adaptation capacity, and financing
Just energy transition policy and the governance of renewable energy systems
The achievements, limitations, and future direction of the climate justice movement
Biodiversity, urban ecology, and the intersection of environmental and social policy
