Community-embedded Energy Transition Planning for Climate Resilience
Access to energy is critical to the wellbeing of individuals, families, communities, and businesses. However, transition of fossil fuel-based energy systems is essential to avoid runaway climate change, and the physical infrastructure that transports and delivers energy is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that have already begun to materialize.
This project focuses on enhancing energy transition planning, recognizing that such plans must: integrate mitigation and adaptation; embrace a justice framework; and be socio-culturally embedded within local geographies.
Our primary objectives are to
Co-produce directly applicable knowledge to facilitate local climate adaptation planning that prioritizes justice and wellbeing; generate scalable knowledge to support capacity-building, enabled by a comparative approach.
Our international research team includes leading and emerging scholars
spanning multiple disciplines, each of whom is uniquely qualified for and committed to interdisciplinarity, collaboration, community engagement, and equity, diversity and inclusion.
Case studies represent equity-deserving Indigenous and marginalized communities uniquely vulnerable to climate change in Canada, the U.S., Norway, Germany, Mexico and Ghana, each of which hold in common three key climate risks: critical infrastructure; living standards; and peace and human mobility. One or more members of our team already has organizational partnerships in each of our case communities, enabling rapid deployment of research activities.
In each case, we will assess key risks; identify a range of regionally-appropriate options for mitigative/adaptive energy transition; pursue community-engagement to identify collective visions for equitable, livable communities based on local needs, values, and practices; and map enablements and constraints to the realization of those visions.
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