MSc Global Development (Environment and Climate Change)

Climate change represents one of the most serious challenges currently facing urban poverty reduction. Despite uncertainties within the field of climate science, there is a broad consensus that human-induced carbon emissions are already causing climate change. At a global level, the poor are most likely to experience its effects; in particular, the urban poor majority in cities of the global South are among the most vulnerable to climate-related disasters and changing patterns of severe weather.

Over the past two decades alone, disasters have claimed more than two million lives, with 98 per cent of casualties occurring in developing countries, and climate-related disasters accounting for two-thirds of the total. As well as one-off events, urban residents' homes and livelihoods are also threatened by slow, insidious, weather-related changes brought about by climate change. In urban areas where institutional responses are limited by resources or capacity, households, small businesses and communities are leading adaptation efforts at the local level.

This course will explore how best to strengthen the resilience of these communities to climate change and climate-related disasters, in support of sustainable urban poverty reduction.

The course unit aims to provide:

1. An introduction to the relationships between climate change and development, with a particular focus on experiences and responses in lower-income countries of the Global South.

2. An understanding of the unequal distribution of climate change impacts and drivers behind this distribution.

3. The ability to operationalise key theoretical frameworks and concepts used to understand relationships between climate change and human wellbeing, such as resilience, vulnerability, intersectionality, maladaptation and climate justice.

4. The ability to critically evaluate the trade-offs in climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and the political processes/relationships by which climate change responses are determined.

5. An opportunity for students to develop their range of competencies in transferable areas, including research, analysis, report writing, team-work, and both written and verbal forms of communication.

This course unit will be organised around the key concepts of mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage:

The first part of the course unit (mitigation and development) will:

• Introduce climate justice as a key analytical lens

• Outline the history of international climate change mitigation efforts, particularly the positioning and advocacy of Global South countries

• Explore the possibilities, challenges and trade-offs of incremental and more radical mitigation options

The second part of the course unit (adaptation and development) will:

• Introduce key frameworks for understanding relationships between climate change and human wellbeing, such as resilience, vulnerability, intersectionality and precarity

• Demonstrate the political nature of climate change adaptation through specific cases

• Evaluate different kinds of adaptation interventions and the extent to which these can successfully reduce vulnerabilities

• Discuss the drivers of maladaptation and ways to address them

The third part of the course unit (loss and damage) will:

• Explore the evolution of discourses and policies around loss and damage and climate reparations

• Examine the conceptual, empirical and political challenges of addressing loss and damage in practice

The nine lectures will be complemented by 4*2-hour tutorial sessions focusing on practical responses to the climate crisis, such as skills for communicating environmental change to academic and non-academic audiences. Students will also work on their first assignment in groups during the tutorial sessions, allowing them to obtain formative feedback from course teaching staff.

• 9*2-hour lectures, comprising a mixture of lecture content and interactive activities (including making use in-lecture of digital discussion tools such as Padlet) where students apply the theories and frameworks covered in the lecture content to case study examples
• 4*2-hour tutorials (20-30 students) focusing on climate change communication skills (for academic and non-academic audiences) and on how students can take practical action on climate change. Tutorials 2, 3 and 4 will also guidance on the first assignment (group video presentation) and opportunities to obtain feedback on group ideas and progress
•  1*2-hour course wrap up and second assignment Q&A
• Supporting content for the course unit will be on the VLE, including PowerPoint slides, videos used in-lecture, and additional resources such as papers and news reports

• Explain key debates around climate change mitigation, adaptation and development, and take an informed position in these debates 
• Explain and apply key concepts and frameworks such as resilience, vulnerability, maladaptation and climate justice 
• Place climate impacts and adaptation in the wider context of international and global development
  
   

• Describe different approaches to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change
• Evaluate the social and environmental trade-offs and challenges associated with different adaptation and mitigation approaches
• Critically appraise the politics and power relationships which foreground certain kinds of adaptation or mitigation response
  
   

• Choose and apply frameworks to analyses environmental challenges and their impacts on human societies and wellbeing 
• Communicate about climate and development issues to both academic and non-academic audiences
• Make reasoned recommendations for climate policy and practice based on critical appraisal of the evidence
   

• Undertake both team-based and independent work to deadlines

• Individual critical report – evaluating climate change impacts and adaptation strategies in a case study country (2,000 words)
• Group presentation – critical evaluation of a climate change mitigation strategy (10 minutes)

Via the VLE within 3 weeks of submission

Boyd, E., Chaffin, B.C., Dorkenoo, K., Jackson, G., Harrington, L., N'guetta, A., Johansson, E.L., Nordlander, L., De Rosa, S.P., Raju, E. and Scown, M., 2021. Loss and damage from climate change: A new climate justice agenda. One Earth, 4(10), pp.1365-1370. 
Eriksen, S.H., Nightingale, A.J. and Eakin, H., 2015. Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change adaptation. Global environmental change, 35, pp.523-533.
Henrique, K.P. and Tschakert, P., 2019. Contested grounds: Adaptation to flooding and the politics of (in) visibility in São Paulo’s eastern periphery. Geoforum, 104, pp.181-192. 
Kallis, G., Kostakis, V., Lange, S., Muraca, B., Paulson, S. and Schmelzer, M., 2018. Research on degrowth. Annual review of environment and resources, 43(1), pp.291-316. 
Manyena, S.B., 2006. The concept of resilience revisited. Disasters, 30(4), pp.434-450. 
O'Brien, K., Eriksen, S., Nygaard, L.P. and Schjolden, A.N.E., 2007. Why different interpretations of vulnerability matter in climate change discourses. Climate policy, 7(1), pp.73-88. 
Okereke, C. and Coventry, P., 2016. Climate justice and the international regime: before, during, and after Paris. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(6), pp.834-851. 
Schipper, E.L.F., 2020. Maladaptation: when adaptation to climate change goes very wrong. One earth, 3(4), pp.409-414. 
Schlosberg, D. and Collins, L.B., 2014. From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(3), pp.359-374. 
Seddon, N., Smith, A., Smith, P., Key, I., Chausson, A., Girardin, C., House, J., Srivastava, S. and Turner, B., 2021. Getting the message right on nature‐based solutions to climate change. Global change biology, 27(8), pp.1518-1546. 
See, J., Cuaton, G.P., Placino, P., Vunibola, S., Do Thi, H., Dombroski, K. and McKinnon, K., 2024. From absences to emergences: Foregrounding traditional and Indigenous climate change adaptation knowledges and practices from Fiji, Vietnam and the Philippines. World Development, 176, p.106503. 
Stoddard, I., Anderson, K., Capstick, S., Carton, W., Depledge, J., Facer, K., Gough, C., Hache, F., Hoolohan, C., Hultman, M. and Hällström, N., 2021. Three decades of climate mitigation: why haven't we bent the global emissions curve?. Annual review of environment and resources, 46(1), pp.653-689. 
Sultana, F., 2022. The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, p.102638.