Item talk:Q672

Rationale

The impacts of climate change are unequally distributed. It is important to see how policies are tackling these inequalities, which is often done by targeting specific groups of people that are more vulnerable or are otherwise more likely to be impacted.

Concept methodology

The development of this concept relied in no small part on expert interviews to try to represent a variety of perspectives. Starting with a list of 10 vulnerable groups that are mentioned in climate policy [1], we made 2 major adjustments based on those interviews:

1. we added the "impacted workers" category. This is to acknowledge that the response to climate change will also have impacts. For example, the manufacturing of electric vehicles requires fewer components than combustion engine cars. This means that some factory workers will likely lose their job. This change also allowed us to zoom in further on the class-based elements of climate impacts, with the working class typically having fewer means to adapt to climate change. Note, however, that it proved difficult to build a sufficiently precise classifier for Impacted Workers. We are working on creating a better version, but until then, mentions of impacted workers are not yet identified on the CPR website.
2. We created 5 main impacted groups to recognise the different mechanisms through which people are impacted, in part based on [2]. In practice, people are often impacted through multiple mechanisms at once. As much as possible, we tried to accommodate this nuance by allowing sub-concepts to have multiple parent concepts.

References & acknowledgements

We are grateful for the input of: Tiffanie Chan at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment; Jonathan Camuzeaux at the Environmental Defence Fund, Ali Poncia at Trade Union Congress, Keegan McChesney at the Local Initiatives Support Corp, Dr Erica Holloman-Hill at Ayika Solutions, and Ana Maria Tribin and Liang Shen at the World Bank. They all contributed greatly to the development of this concept and its sub-concepts.

[1] Chan T, Wang JA, Higham C. Mapping justice in national climate action: a global overview of just transition policies. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. 2024 Jun.

[2] Billi M, Bórquez R, Varela JC, Aldunce P, Aspee N, Beauchamp E, Berríos P, Cuevas M, Loboguerrero AM, Bustos FM, Patwardhan A. A pioneering approach to measure increased resilience to face climate change: insights from the Race to Resilience campaign. Environmental Research Communications. 2024 Sep 9;6(9):095006.