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Sustainable climate policies can benefit both environment and social justice, researchers say

2025-04-21 - 2025-04

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.
The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It's not all doom and gloom," said report author Peter Reich, professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability (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.
In its new report, the team examined connections between climate impacts, mitigation strategies and social justice considerations, like wealth distribution and overall public health and well-being.
While the effort did show certain countries performing better and worse by certain metrics, the team's goal wasn't to rank, praise or critique. It was to find an answer to a much more fundamental question: Is there evidence that it's possible to build up sustainable policies and infrastructure in a just way?
"Because inequity can result from mitigation actions themselves, sometimes that can have a perverse effect and actually slow down the broader adoption of mitigation strategies," said Reich, who is also a professor at the University of Minnesota.
This slowing has contributed to a dogmatic belief that asking poorer countries to move to renewables is asking their people to suffer, he added.
"But there's no consistent evidence suggesting that moving to renewable energy has overall negative impacts or consequences for poorer countries or their peoples," Reich said. "If countries are able to invest in renewables, we're seeing cases where it's actually beneficial for their people, it's reducing pollution and it's slowing climate change. It's a win-win-win."
As an example, the team found thirteen low-to-medium-income countries that were increasing their renewable deployment along with their average income and gross domestic product per capita over the last 30 years. Those countries also saw their emissions and Gini indices, a measure of inequality, drop.
"We're not saying it's all causally related," Reich said. "But there's no evidence that renewables are getting in the way of equity or economic advancement."
Another important point that Reich stressed is that this does not let wealthy countries with high emissions, such as the U.S., off the hook. They still need to work harder to decarbonize in order to reach international climate goals, he said, but he believes the economic data will compel them to act. "Every decade that we wait to take action, we see the cost of climate change damages go up astronomically and the cost of renewables go down," Reich said. "That's not just me, some ecologist, making up these numbers. They come from major corporations and insurers whose jobs are to understand the risks."
Although he admits time could prove him wrong for feeling this way, Reich does walk away from the team's study with optimism.
"We're not wide-eyed idealists. The international community hasn't solved this yet, and is not going to solve it tomorrow," he said. "But we can slow and eventually stop climate change, and do so while actually saving money and enhancing environmental justice."

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Sustainable climate policies can benefit both environment and social justice, researchers say