As evidence continues to pour in showing that climate change’s impacts disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities around the globe, so, too, do stories showing that these communities can also pay outsized costs to implement climate solutions.

Yet, in examining the available body of data and literature detailing how different countries have rolled out climate change mitigation strategies, research led by the University of Michigan has found reasons for optimism.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” said report author Peter Reich, professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS, and director of the Institute for Global Change Biology.

“I think there’s an expectation that poor countries have to pollute to bring a middle-class life to most of its people, like we did. But we’ve seen some low-middle-income countries start to decarbonize through investing in renewables and increasing energy efficiency. And they are lowering their emissions while reducing income inequality and increasing the well-being of their people.”

At the same time, Reich said, it’s all too easy to find cases where vulnerable peoples experience negative consequences from investments in renewables. Take, for example, Indigenous people who have been forced off of their land to build a hydroelectric dam. In fact, that was part of the inspiration for the new study.

There are hundreds of research articles and as many pages of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that highlight such inequities. These are found both in the effects of climate change and also in the mitigation strategies used to slow and stop climate change. Reich and his collaborators wanted to extract broader insights by starting to bring those individual reports together under a systematic and comprehensive analytical framework.

Study: Mitigation Justice

Read the full releas on the Michigan News website.