The study rests on 22 semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, philanthropic funders, non-governmental organization leaders, Indigenous representatives, and community organizers across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, supplemented by participant observation at a regional climate adaptation event. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling, with data collection continuing until thematic saturation was reached. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed through an inductive thematic approach, allowing themes such as funding access, policy support, and barriers to collaboration to emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. The work received ethical approval from the Grenfell Campus Research Ethics Board and forms part of a larger transdisciplinary project on collaborative governance in financing climate adaptation and mitigation.

Conceptually, the research is anchored in the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, which treats communities not as isolated units of adaptation but as nodes embedded within interconnected social, institutional, and ecological systems. From this perspective, the most effective adaptation strategies emerge from feedback loops between community experience, institutional support, and environmental change. The author also frames the translation of local knowledge as a three-stage process: recognition, in which local knowledge is acknowledged as a valid source of environmental information; valuing, in which it gains real influence over the priorities and design of adaptation plans; and use, in which it is applied alongside scientific tools to concrete planning decisions, such as combining elders’ memories of past shoreline positions with geospatial mapping.

The findings are striking in their consistency: local knowledge is central to building climate resilience, not peripheral to it. Participants described a rich tapestry of knowledge forms, from fishers’ observations of shifting marine species to the Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples, which reflects generations of observation of seasonal change, animal behaviour, and land management. The study also highlights the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, introduced by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall, which calls for weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together rather than treating them as competing systems. One participant captured the grassroots ethos succinctly, explaining that the work is not about telling communities what to do but about communities receiving support and encouragement for what they are already doing and want to do.

In practice, this knowledge is being mobilized through four broad categories of adaptation activity. Education and outreach initiatives, including arts communication projects and museum preservation efforts responding to shoreline erosion, rely heavily on cultural knowledge and build public engagement. Community and skills-building efforts, such as public education sessions and community-garden knowledge-sharing, transmit expertise effectively at small scale. Natural infrastructure projects, including living shorelines and regenerative agriculture, showed the deepest integration of traditional ecological knowledge, drawing directly on longstanding local practices. Community planning initiatives, particularly municipal climate advisory committees with formal community representation, demonstrated the strongest institutional uptake. In one municipality, eight community consultation sessions on climate adaptation directly informed local plans, while in another, five of twelve council seats were held in ways that fostered trust and shared responsibility.

Yet the study documents a persistent gap between recognition and substantive use. Systemic barriers, including rigid, short-term funding programs, top-down policy frameworks, and heavy bureaucratic requirements, continue to limit the consistent and equitable application of local knowledge. One participant from a community NGO criticized federal funding structures as formulaic, with everything prescribed in advance and little room for genuine collaboration. A municipal official noted the absence of internal resources to adequately cover climate programs, and another organization described the lack of continuity between short grants as very harmful to progress. Smaller and rural communities face particular disadvantages, forced to compete against large municipalities with dedicated administrative staff for funding opportunities they often lack the capacity to pursue.

Equity concerns surfaced repeatedly. A community foundation representative pointed to Nova Scotia’s history of environmental racism and suggested it extends to adaptation efforts, underscoring the need to embed climate justice principles in planning. Volunteer burnout emerged as another strain on smaller organizations. At the same time, participants identified clear enablers: strong local leadership, grassroots engagement that lets communities define their own priorities, collaborative governance, and flexible funding arrangements. Multi-year funding commitments were described as a game changer, allowing organizations to plan and sustain projects rather than lurching from one grant cycle to the next.

The role of partnerships proved double-edged. Multi-stakeholder platforms connecting municipalities, Indigenous groups, and NGOs were praised for pooling resources and building legitimacy, with one program coordinator noting that such partnerships ensure local knowledge shapes coastal resilience projects. But power dynamics matter enormously. One community organizer observed that input is often sought while final decisions ignore community priorities, such as protecting cultural sites. This distinction between being consulted and having actual influence echoes the scholarly argument that meaningful knowledge co-production requires redistributing decision-making authority, not simply inviting participation. The clearest cases of effective collaboration in the study were precisely those where such redistribution occurred.

Federal policy frameworks received a mixed assessment. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy was seen as supportive in principle but weak in practice, with one provincial program planner observing that it encourages local knowledge while lacking clear guidelines for implementation. Large funding programs, such as the 41-million-dollar Climate-Resilient Coastal Communities initiative running from 2023 to 2028, provided essential resources, enabling one Nova Scotia municipality to hire local experts to map erosion risks based on community input. But access inequities persist, and rigid use-case restrictions can leave communities unable to pay for what they actually need most: staff and people. By contrast, municipal-level policies establishing climate advisory committees were praised for creating goodwill by giving community members a formal voice in decision-making.

The study concludes that resilience cannot be delivered from the top down; it must be built through collaboration and continuous learning across the system. The author calls for policy shifts to institutionalize long-term, locally controlled funding, formalize community participation in decision-making, and embed equity-centered, co-productive approaches into adaptation frameworks. Without these enabling conditions, the role of local knowledge risks being reduced to a symbolic gesture rather than serving as a core driver of adaptation. The findings carry weight well beyond Atlantic Canada, offering a template for any jurisdiction grappling with how to move beyond token acknowledgment of community expertise toward climate action that is adaptive, context-specific, and grounded in the lived realities of the people who know their places best. As the author notes, the study’s qualitative design offers transferable insight into similar rural and coastal contexts rather than statistically generalizable conclusions, and future research probing how local knowledge shapes the most contentious decisions, such as managed retreat, would be a valuable extension.

Subject of Research: Integration of local and Indigenous knowledge into community climate change adaptation planning in Atlantic Canada

Article Title: Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action

Article References: Yirenkyi, E. (2026). Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Keywords: climate adaptation, local knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, Atlantic Canada, socio-ecological systems, co-production, climate governance, funding, coastal communities, participatory planning, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland

Solar geoengineering refers to a set of emerging technologies that would seek to cool the planet by reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space. The most widely discussed approach, stratospheric aerosol injection, would scatter reflective particles high in the atmosphere to lower global temperatures temporarily. Proponents point out that such techniques might reduce the worst impacts of climate change while humanity works to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Critics counter that the technologies carry serious risks of their own, including the possibility of technological lock-in, in which societies become dependent on continued deployment, and mitigation deterrence, in which the prospect of a technological fix weakens the political will to reduce emissions in the first place.

It is precisely because the potential benefits and dangers are so entangled that questions of justice and ethics sit at the center of the debate, the authors contend. Who would bear the risks of deployment? Who would benefit? Who gets a voice in deciding? Many scholars have responded to these questions by asserting a clear justice landscape, mapping out in advance which interventions would be fair and which would not. Jinnah, Williams, and McKinnon take a different view. In their essay, they argue that the terrain is complicated, nuanced, and not fully mapped, and that pretending otherwise risks closing down conversations before they have properly begun.

To illustrate that complexity, the essay explores three core narratives at the intersection of solar geoengineering and justice. The first is intergenerational ethics, the question of what present generations owe to future ones. Solar geoengineering is distinctive among climate responses because its effects would be temporally extended in unusual ways. A deployment program might need to continue for decades or longer, and termination could bring rapid temperature rebounds with severe consequences for people who had no say in the original decision. Future generations, in other words, would inherit both the climate consequences and the governance commitments of choices made today, yet they cannot participate in any deliberation. That asymmetry complicates any simple claim that deploying or refusing to deploy the technology is straightforwardly just.

The second narrative concerns participatory justice, the demand that those potentially affected by a decision have a genuine opportunity to shape it. Solar geoengineering poses an acute version of this problem because its impacts would be global while its governance, at least initially, is likely to be controlled by a small number of states, institutions, or even private actors with the technical capacity to act. Meaningful participation across nations with vastly different resources, vulnerabilities, and scientific capacities is extraordinarily difficult to design. Yet the authors suggest that the difficulty of achieving perfect participation should not be treated as a reason to abandon the effort. Instead, the quality of the participatory process itself becomes a central object of ethical scrutiny.

The third narrative involves recognitional and reparational justice. Recognition asks whether the identities, values, and knowledge systems of different communities, particularly those historically marginalized in international environmental politics, are respected in the debate. Reparation asks whether past injustices, including the unequal historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and the colonial legacies that shape global science and governance, are acknowledged and addressed. For many countries in the Global South, solar geoengineering raises the specter of yet another arena in which powerful actors make decisions with planetary consequences while the most vulnerable communities absorb the risks. Williams, whose work engages climate governance in Africa, brings that perspective to bear on an argument that justice claims in this space cannot be evaluated in the abstract but must reckon with these historical patterns.

What unites the three narratives is the authors’ conclusion that the field has been too focused on outcomes and not focused enough on procedures. Debates about solar geoengineering often proceed as if the central question were whether a given deployment scenario would produce a net benefit for humanity, a calculation that could in principle be settled by models and impact assessments. The essay pushes back against that framing. If the terrain of justice is genuinely unmapped, then certainty about just outcomes is premature, and the ethical weight shifts to how research, deliberation, and any eventual decisions are conducted. Are the practices governing experimentation transparent? Do they include the people whose lives would be most affected? Are they designed in ways that remain accountable over the long time horizons the technology would demand?

This procedural turn has practical implications. It suggests that early governance choices, such as norms around research funding, transparency requirements for outdoor experiments, and the inclusion of diverse voices in advisory bodies, are not merely administrative preliminaries to the real debate. They are the real debate, because they establish the practices within which all later decisions will be made. A governance architecture that embeds participation, recognition, and accountability from the start could make even a decision to ban solar geoengineering more legitimate, just as a closed and exclusive process could delegitimize even a well-intentioned research program. The authors argue that focusing on just processes and practices for technological innovation and governance could enhance the capacity to co-create a world where any decision on solar geoengineering, whether to ban it or move it forward, rests on thoughtful, ethical, and participatory decision-making that speaks to the interests of all people potentially affected.

The essay also carries a message for the research community. Much of the existing scholarship on geoengineering ethics has sought to adjudicate between competing justice claims, effectively drawing boundaries around what a just position would look like. Jinnah, Williams, and McKinnon instead call for humility about the limits of current understanding. The justice landscape, on their account, is not a finished map waiting to be consulted but a territory still being charted, one in which new voices, new impacts, and new institutional arrangements could shift the ethical calculus. That humility does not mean paralysis. It means treating deliberation itself as an ongoing practice whose quality matters as much as its conclusions.

As interest in solar geoengineering research grows, with modeling studies, small-scale experiments, and governance proposals multiplying across universities and international bodies, the questions raised by the essay are becoming more urgent. The technology could temporarily lower global temperatures and reduce some of the worst impacts of climate change, but it could also entrench dependence, weaken mitigation, and concentrate power in the hands of a few. Whether it is ultimately banned, deployed, or left untested, the decision will be one of the most consequential humanity has faced. The authors’ argument is that the measure of that decision’s legitimacy will lie less in the outcome it produces and more in the fairness of the process that produced it, a standard that demands attention now, long before any thermostat for the planet is touched.

Subject of Research: Justice and ethics in solar geoengineering governance

Article Title: Mapping justice claims for solar geoengineering

Article References: Jinnah, S., Williams, P. A., & McKinnon, C. (2026). Mapping justice claims for solar geoengineering. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001054. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001054

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001054

Keywords: solar geoengineering, climate governance, intergenerational ethics, participatory justice, recognitional justice, reparational justice, stratospheric aerosol injection, mitigation deterrence, technological lock-in, PLOS Climate, climate ethics, global south

The study focused on three of the most prominent engineered carbon removal methods now moving from laboratory to real-world deployment. Direct air carbon capture and storage, or DACCS, strips carbon dioxide from ambient air using chemical sorbents and locks it underground. Bioenergy carbon capture and storage, known as BECCS, grows biomass that absorbs carbon, burns it for energy and captures the resulting emissions. Enhanced rock weathering, or ERW, spreads crushed silicate minerals on land, accelerating natural chemical reactions that pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and eventually lock it away in oceans and soils. Each carries a distinct risk and cost profile, from land-use conflicts and energy demands to mining and transport burdens, yet the researchers discovered something remarkable: the technology itself mattered far less than the way it was implemented.

To isolate what actually drives public acceptance, the team ran a multifactorial vignette experiment embedded in surveys conducted in Brazil, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Roughly 1,800 respondents per country were assigned to one of the three technologies and then evaluated five hypothetical projects out of 36 possible variants. Each project description differed along four attributes grounded in a multidimensional conception of justice: who implemented the project, whether the decision-making process involved consultation, how profits were distributed, and how much carbon the project could remove. Respondents rated each project on a ten-point scale from strong opposition to strong support, generating more than 54,000 individual evaluations for statistical analysis.

The headline result is unambiguous. Across every country and every technology, procedural fairness exerted the strongest effect on support. Compared with projects approved by authorities without any consultation, opening the decision-making process to local communities or scientific experts increased support by roughly 1.0 to 1.7 points on the ten-point scale. The effect was largest in Brazil, where consulting the affected population raised support by 1.68 points, and smallest but still substantial in Saudi Arabia, at just over 1.0 point. Notably, consulting local communities and consulting scientific experts produced nearly identical gains, suggesting that what matters to the public is the principle of being heard, not the specific identity of who is asked.

Distributive fairness came a close second. When developers retained all profits, projects fared worst. Redistributing revenues to affected local communities increased support by between roughly 0.5 and 1.25 scale points, with the largest effect again in Brazil, followed by the United Kingdom and Italy. Not-for-profit arrangements, in which carbon removal operates as a public service without generating profit, also raised support everywhere, though less dramatically in Saudi Arabia. By contrast, whether a company or a regional government carried out the project made little difference in most countries, with only a modest penalty for corporate implementation in the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway and Malaysia. The lesson for the emerging carbon removal industry is uncomfortable: the public appears far more interested in how benefits flow than in who owns the machinery.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns trade-offs. The researchers tested whether a project promising high removal capacity could compensate for unfair governance, and the answer was a clear no. Across nearly all countries, the effect of increasing carbon removal was remarkably similar regardless of whether projects consulted anyone or shared profits. Respondents rewarded projects that were both effective and fairly governed, but these two considerations operated independently. A high-capacity project run without consultation and with privatized profits still lost the support that fairness would have generated. The reverse also held: progressive governance could not rescue a project with meager removal performance. From the perspective of public legitimacy, neither technical excellence nor ethical design alone is sufficient.

Support levels themselves varied across countries in ways the authors interpret cautiously. Brazil and Saudi Arabia showed the highest average support, with means between roughly 7.1 and 7.3, while European respondents were more moderate, with Norway recording the lowest scores, averaging around 5.1 to 5.4 depending on the technology. The researchers warn that cross-cultural differences in survey response styles, such as tendencies toward acquiescence or avoiding extreme answers, may partly explain these gaps, and they emphasize the experimentally varied attributes over absolute levels. Within Europe, DACCS consistently received lower support than the other two methods, while in Malaysia no significant differences emerged among the technologies at all.

When asked directly what level of public involvement would be fair, respondents revealed a strong appetite for engagement. Allocating decision-making authority to local communities was judged the fairest option for permitting projects by around 44 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom and Italy, 43 percent in Norway, and between 34 and 39 percent in Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Only a tiny fraction, between 2 and 9 percent, thought local communities should have no involvement at all. Strikingly, political orientation played almost no role in shaping support, a sharp contrast with the well-documented polarization of climate attitudes more broadly. Carbon removal, the data suggest, has not yet been absorbed into partisan identity, and public judgments rest instead on risk perceptions, trust and effectiveness.

Even self-described opponents of hosting carbon removal near their homes responded to fairness cues. Dividing respondents into opponents, moderates and supporters of local projects, the researchers found similar preference structures across all three groups, with opponents reacting as strongly or more strongly to governance attributes than anyone else. Opponents, in other words, do not categorically reject carbon removal; they remain open to projects developed through consultation and benefit sharing. This conditional openness offers developers a genuine path forward, but also a narrow one, since perceived injustice can trigger the protests, litigation and delays that have stalled energy infrastructure around the world.

The authors caution that today’s moderate support and weak polarization reflect the novelty of these technologies and low public familiarity, not a stable consensus. As real projects take shape and costs, trade-offs and distributional questions become tangible, controversies are likely to intensify, and spillovers from adjacent debates over biofuels, carbon storage, fracking or nuclear waste could reshape perceptions rapidly. Their prescriptions are correspondingly structural: open decision processes to public and expert scrutiny, treat carbon removal as a public good rather than a profit engine, and experiment with regional, upstream engagement at the planning stage rather than leaving participation to developer-led consultations after key choices are made. With national carbon removal governance still nascent in most of the world, the window for embedding justice into deployment pathways remains open, but the study’s message is that it will not stay that way for long.

Subject of Research: Public support for novel carbon dioxide removal technologies and the role of procedural and distributive fairness in their governance

Article Title: Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness

Article References: Fritz, L., Losi, L., Merk, C., Boldrini, M., Bosetti, V., Baum, C. M., & Sovacool, B. K. (2026). Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness. Nature Climate Change, 16(10), 1152-1161. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02741-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02741-7

Keywords: carbon dioxide removal, public perception, procedural fairness, distributive fairness, direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced rock weathering, climate governance, survey experiment, social acceptance, climate policy, benefit sharing

The research team conducted a rapid review of global case studies, a method designed to synthesize a broad and scattered evidence base within a structured analytical frame. Rather than cataloguing individual examples of unfairness, the authors interrogated the accumulated evidence to identify where and how climate action is engaging with the core pillars of justice that political philosophers and environmental justice scholars have developed over decades. Their conclusion is both encouraging and cautionary. The three classical dimensions of justice—distributive, procedural, and recognitional—are indeed being engaged with in urban climate initiatives worldwide, but the depth and simultaneity of that engagement determines whether an intervention becomes genuinely transformative or merely cosmetic.

Distributive justice, the first pillar, concerns who receives the benefits and burdens of climate policy. In practical terms, it asks whether a new flood barrier protects wealthy waterfront districts while informal settlements remain exposed, or whether urban tree-planting programs cool already leafy neighborhoods while heat-vulnerable districts stay bare. The review finds that cities increasingly deploy joint mitigation and adaptation interventions—projects that reduce emissions while building resilience—and that the distributional question is now explicitly on the agenda in many of them. Yet distribution alone is a blunt instrument. A solar subsidy program can be perfectly equal in formal terms and still be inaccessible to renters, low-income households, or residents without legal tenure, which is why the authors insist that distributional analysis must be paired with the other pillars.

Procedural justice addresses the second dimension: who participates in deciding. It examines whether affected communities have genuine voice in the design, implementation, and evaluation of climate interventions, or whether participation is reduced to token consultation after the key decisions have been made. The synthesized case studies show that exclusionary governance remains one of the most persistent barriers to equitable urban climate action. When planning processes are technically opaque, conducted in dominant languages only, or scheduled in ways that exclude working residents, the resulting policies tend to reproduce the very vulnerabilities they claim to address. The review identifies procedural reforms—co-production of plans with communities, transparent decision criteria, and accountability mechanisms—as a recurring feature of the more successful pathways.

Recognitional justice, the third classical pillar, goes deeper still. It asks whether the identities, histories, and knowledge systems of marginalized groups are respected within climate governance. Recognition failures can be subtle: Indigenous worldviews dismissed as irrelevant to technical flood modeling, gendered patterns of climate vulnerability ignored in mobility planning, or the specific exposures of migrants and ethnic minorities rendered invisible in aggregate city statistics. The authors find that recognition is increasingly invoked in climate action, but that it is often the thinnest of the three pillars in practice, acknowledged in policy language without changing who holds power or whose knowledge counts.

This is where the paper’s conceptual contribution becomes significant. The team extends the standard triad by integrating two additional dimensions: epistemic justice and restorative justice. Epistemic justice concerns the credibility afforded to different kinds of knowledge. In urban climate contexts, this means treating residents’ lived experience of flooding or heat as legitimate evidence alongside satellite data and hydrological models, and creating institutional channels through which local and Indigenous knowledge can genuinely inform technical decisions. Restorative justice, meanwhile, addresses deeply rooted systemic exclusions by confronting historical wrongs—colonial dispossession, discriminatory housing policy, and the extraction that built urban wealth in some places at the expense of others. A city cannot simply plan forward from an unjust baseline, the framework suggests; it must also account for how that baseline was produced.

The central analytical claim of the review is that climate initiatives are more likely to become transformative when they address multiple dimensions of justice simultaneously. This is a testable proposition with real design implications. A cooling center program that distributes resources fairly (distributive), is sited through community deliberation (procedural), respects the needs of elderly residents and informal workers (recognitional), incorporates their knowledge of neighborhood microclimates (epistemic), and acknowledges past disinvestment in their districts (restorative) is structurally different from a program that scores well on only one axis. The authors argue that single-pillar interventions tend to stall or backslide, because unresolved injustices in other dimensions eventually undermine them—participation without recognition becomes tokenism, and recognition without redistribution becomes symbolism.

From the synthesized evidence, the researchers distill key principles for enabling just and equitable action. While the review is careful not to prescribe a single template—urban contexts vary enormously between, say, a rapidly growing South Asian megacity and a shrinking post-industrial city in Europe—the principles converge on a common logic. Justice must be embedded from the earliest stages of intervention design rather than retrofitted after opposition emerges. Power must be genuinely shared with the communities who bear climate risks. Knowledge hierarchies that privilege formal expertise must be opened to plural ways of knowing. And institutions must be built to sustain these practices over time, because justice is not a one-time consultation but an ongoing condition of governance.

The practical payoff of the framework is a shift in what the field asks of research. As the authors put it in their abstract, the work is intended to move researchers and practitioners beyond identifying climate injustices toward an actionable roadmap for co-producing equitable climate solutions. Co-production is the operative term: the pathways the review maps are not top-down blueprints delivered to passive beneficiaries, but collaborative processes in which residents, municipal agencies, researchers, and civil society organizations jointly define problems and solutions. This framing reflects a broader movement in sustainability science over the past decade, but the review gives it sharper normative teeth by insisting that the quality of co-production be judged against all five justice dimensions.

The timing of this synthesis matters. Urban populations continue to grow fastest precisely in regions with the highest climate exposure and the weakest adaptive capacity, and national governments remain slow to deliver the finance and institutional support cities need. In that gap, municipal governments, community organizations, and hybrid actors are improvising climate action on their own—and the review’s evidence suggests that those improvisations succeed most often when justice is treated as constitutive of effectiveness rather than as a constraint on it. The authors declare no competing financial interests, and the paper is published open access, making the framework available to the practitioners it is meant to serve. What the study ultimately offers is a vocabulary and a checklist for a question that every city will face this century: not simply whether climate action happens, but who it is for, who decides, and whose past it repairs.

Subject of Research: Urban climate justice frameworks for equitable mitigation and adaptation in cities

Article Title: Overcoming urban climate injustice: synthesising global pathways and principles

Article References: Prakash, A., Bulkeley, H. A., Singh, C., McGregor, D., & George, R. (2026). Overcoming urban climate injustice: synthesising global pathways and principles. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00477-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00477-z

Keywords: urban climate justice, climate adaptation, climate mitigation, distributive justice, procedural justice, recognitional justice, epistemic justice, restorative justice, co-production, urban sustainability, climate governance, rapid review

Delina introduces the concept of adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure. The term is deliberately analogous to roads or power grids: just as physical infrastructure organises access and movement, financial infrastructure organises decision-making. It consists of the institutional arrangements, intermediaries, metrics, and decision rules that determine which vulnerabilities are prioritised and whose knowledge counts. Viewed this way, adaptation finance is not an external mechanism layered onto climate governance — it is a mode through which governance itself is enacted. The essay draws on concrete practices to make the case, including the Green Climate Fund’s readiness processes, creditworthiness-based urban resilience programmes, and the standardised risk metrics used in sovereign and project appraisal.

The technocratic character of mainstream adaptation finance sits at the heart of the argument. Policy debates typically revolve around bankability, cost-benefit ratios, risk pricing, and project pipelines. Vulnerability is represented through hazard maps, exposure metrics, and probabilistic models that underpin investment decisions. These tools can support structured allocation, but they also recode vulnerability into forms that are legible to financial systems. Complex, historically produced inequalities are translated into quantifiable risks, and diverse lived experiences are compressed into comparable metrics. In the process, adaptation risks being depoliticised: no longer treated as a condition rooted in social and institutional contexts, but as a set of variables to be managed within investment models.

The consequences of this recoding are far-reaching. When vulnerability is framed as a project input to be measured, priced, and mitigated, adaptation is reconfigured as a sequence of discrete interventions that can be packaged, financed, and monitored — often detached from broader questions of land tenure, labour precarity, informality, or political marginalisation. Multilateral development banks and climate funds now rely extensively on standardised climate risk-screening tools and economic appraisal frameworks. These approaches tend to privilege interventions with clearly demonstrable, quantifiable returns, such as infrastructure protection, while sidelining less measurable but socially critical forms of resilience, including strengthening informal safety nets or securing land rights. Political choices about which risks are prioritised, over what time horizons, and at whose expense are quietly displaced into the domain of financial calculation.

Delina organises the governance functions of adaptation finance into three interlocking mechanisms. First, finance sets priorities: it determines which risks are considered investable, which geographies are deemed fundable, and which adaptation pathways are recognised as credible. Risk-screening tools used by development banks, for example, often favour interventions that protect infrastructure and economic assets, while adaptation centred on livelihoods or social relations remains less visible within financial appraisal. Second, finance allocates authority, empowering banks, consultants, fund managers, and specialised city finance units while positioning local governments and community organisations as implementers rather than decision-makers. Third, finance structures accountability, dispersing responsibility across investors, implementing agencies, consultants, and oversight bodies through contracts, reporting requirements, and performance metrics — making it difficult to identify who answers when interventions fail.

Intermediaries emerge as the most consequential actors in this infrastructure. Positioned between sources of capital and sites of vulnerability, multilateral development banks, commercial banks, consultancies, project aggregators, insurers, rating agencies, and digital platforms translate climate risks into forms that can be financed, governed, and evaluated. Their function is not simply technical but constitutive of how adaptation itself is defined. To render adaptation legible to financial systems, intermediaries rely on standardisation, comparability, and risk reduction. Diverse, locally embedded vulnerabilities are reformulated into categories that can be aggregated, benchmarked, and priced. Projects are bundled into portfolios, outcomes are expressed through proxy indicators, and uncertainty is recast as measurable risk — reshaping adaptation priorities to align with financial logics and investment expectations.

Urban contexts make these dynamics especially visible. Cities are increasingly positioned as agile, creditworthy actors capable of attracting climate finance directly, yet access is often contingent on fiscal discipline, project readiness, and credit ratings. These criteria reward already-capacitated municipalities while sidelining poorer or informally governed cities. In coastal cities such as Mumbai and Dhaka, adaptation investments have focused on large-scale flood protection aligned with external financing requirements, while informal settlements facing chronic flooding often remain underserved because they resist project standardisation and revenue generation. In Nairobi and Lagos, donor-funded resilience programmes frequently rely on intermediary organisations to aggregate and manage projects, potentially diluting community control over priorities and implementation. Decision-making authority shifts from elected institutions and local communities towards financial intermediaries and external advisers.

The asymmetry is starkest in the Global South, where the disjuncture between sites of vulnerability and sites of financial authority is most pronounced. Climate impacts are concentrated across Asia, Africa, small island states, and parts of Latin America, yet the frameworks through which adaptation is financed — risk metrics, disclosure standards, creditworthiness assessments — are largely developed in financial centres of the Global North and applied across diverse contexts with uneven consequences. The growing use of sovereign climate risk assessments and credit ratings that incorporate climate exposure illustrates the point: these tools aim to make climate risks visible to investors, but they can also shape borrowing costs, influence policy choices, and incentivise governments to prioritise macroeconomic stability and investor confidence over locally grounded needs. In small island developing states such as Fiji and the Maldives, access to multilateral finance often hinges on highly standardised project proposals aligned with external fiduciary and reporting requirements, which can delay disbursement, raise transaction costs, and limit direct access for national and local actors.

Financial centres such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and London increasingly function as translation hubs, converting local climate risks into products that circulate within global capital markets. This translation can unlock new flows of finance, but it can also reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and value: forms of resilience that protect assets, supply chains, and financial stability are elevated, while those that sustain social cohesion, informal economies, or cultural practices remain marginal. The result can be a subtle but consequential decoupling of vulnerability from decision-making — communities most exposed to climate risk often have the least influence over how adaptation is financed and designed, their priorities filtered through external financial rationalities that only partially capture lived vulnerability or the claims of climate justice.

Delina is careful to note that this is not an argument against private or international finance in adaptation. Rather, it underscores that such engagement is never neutral: financial systems shape the terms on which adaptation is imagined, valued, and governed. His proposed framework treats adaptation finance as comprising three elements — financial architectures, intermediaries, and political economy — and shifts analytical attention away from aggregate funding gaps towards questions of institutional design and power. Who sets the rules governing adaptation finance? Which forms of risk are prioritised, and which marginalised? Who benefits from resilience investments, and who bears their costs? Increasing the scale of adaptation finance remains necessary, the essay concludes, but it is insufficient to ensure just or effective outcomes. Without closer attention to governance, expanding finance risks reinforcing technocratic control, marginalising local knowledge, and privileging resilience that protects capital over resilience that sustains lives and livelihoods. Recognising adaptation finance as a terrain of governance and contestation, Delina argues, opens space to imagine alternative financial architectures that are more accountable, more participatory, and more attentive to the historical and structural roots of vulnerability.

Subject of Research: The governance and political economy of climate adaptation finance

Article Title: Financing resilience, governing vulnerability: Adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure

Article References: Delina, L. L. (2026). Financing resilience, governing vulnerability: Adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure. PLOS Climate, 5(10), e0001090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001090

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001090

Keywords: climate adaptation finance, political infrastructure, Green Climate Fund, climate governance, Global South, financial intermediaries, urban resilience, creditworthiness, climate justice, vulnerability, multilateral development banks, PLOS Climate

The study builds on the nexus perspective, which treats biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate as coupled systems rather than separate policy silos. Within this framing, interlinkages describe influences among elements, interdependencies arise when one element depends on another to function, synergies occur when improvement in one element enhances another, and trade-offs occur when improvement in one worsens another. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified climate change as a threat multiplier that deepens existing vulnerabilities in societies shaped by inequality and institutional fragility. Intact ecosystems moderate climatic extremes, regulate hydrological cycles, sustain food production, and protect human health, while degradation weakens these buffering functions and heightens exposure. The authors argue that recognizing this interdependence has not yet produced sufficiently integrated climate action, because mitigation pathways remain misaligned with long-term temperature goals and adaptation measures often lack institutional coherence.

The comparative results reveal three striking patterns. First, ecosystem-centered and demand-side options exhibit the strongest cross-nexus synergies. Agroecology, wetland conservation and restoration, forest-based practices, coastal and marine ecosystem restoration, and sustainable healthy diets show predominantly positive biodiversity-food interactions alongside consistent gains in water regulation and health. Increasing soil organic carbon shows a similar profile, although the permanence of sequestration remains a recognized constraint. Second, infrastructure- and technology-centered mitigation options display more differentiated outcomes. Offshore wind power and land-based solar photovoltaics deliver clear mitigation and health gains through decarbonization and reduced air pollution, but their biodiversity and food-system interactions vary with marine ecosystem disturbance and competition for land. Third, system-enabling options such as multi-hazard early warning systems and reductions in short-lived climate pollutants generate mediated but important effects, with global cooperation for finance and technology functioning as a structural enabler across all domains.

Across every category, trade-offs cluster around land competition, biomass demand, tenure and access rights, affordability, and distributional equity. The authors emphasize that mixed outcomes do not imply net failure; rather, they reveal structural tensions within socio-ecological systems that must be governed rather than ignored. The analysis then applies a second evaluative layer, scoring each option for compatibility with Earth System Justice, a framework that treats distributive equity, procedural fairness, intergenerational responsibility, and recognition of diverse knowledge systems as constitutive elements of planetary governance. Agroecology, forest-based practices, coastal restoration, and sustainable healthy diets score highest on both justice compatibility and nexus governance synergy, while solar and wind power score moderately, reflecting the fact that distributive outcomes hinge on siting, tenure, and benefit-sharing design rather than on technological maturity itself.

To test these mechanisms in the real world, the team traced five enabling-condition cases in depth. In Andhra Pradesh, India, community-managed natural farming reported enhanced agrobiodiversity, improved groundwater recharge, increased dietary diversity, and reduced agrochemical exposure. Agronomic technique alone does not explain these gains. The Rythu Sadhikara Samstha platform connected state agencies with self-help groups, farmer networks, and civil society organizations, decentralizing authority while maintaining coordination, and enabling farmer-led experimentation through field schools. Women farmers and marginal groups were actively included, and synergies stabilized precisely where distributive equity, recognition of local knowledge, and cross-sectoral coordination converged. The case demonstrates that institutional architecture, not merely soil science, determines whether ecological practices translate into system-wide benefits.

Indigenous-led REDD+ initiatives in the Brazilian Amazon tell a parallel story about tenure security. Documented outcomes include avoided deforestation, habitat protection, strengthened watershed function, and reduced fire-related health burdens, with food systems benefiting through continued access to non-timber forest products. Where customary land rights were formally recognized and indigenous institutions retained authority, mitigation aligned with livelihood security. The Amazon Fund linked Indigenous Peoples and local communities, non-governmental organizations, and state agencies within a multi-level governance architecture, while participatory mapping and satellite monitoring integrated scientific tools with indigenous knowledge. Crucially, where communities were treated as beneficiaries rather than rights-holders, conflict and instability followed. Carbon finance without recognition justice, the authors conclude, does not secure durable cross-nexus outcomes.

Further evidence comes from Kenya, where the Mikoko Pamoja initiative links mangrove rehabilitation to community development. Carbon revenues finance education and water infrastructure, and the project operates through community-state-donor co-management with transparent revenue governance and negotiated trade-offs between conservation and livelihoods. In Medellín, Colombia, urban green corridors expanded tree cover, improved air quality, reduced heat exposure, and delivered measurable mental and cardiovascular health benefits, though spatial inequities in access persisted and green gentrification posed risks to vulnerable populations. In Wayanad, India, the revitalization of local diets and health traditions revived wild edible species, strengthened food sovereignty, and improved dietary quality through more than five hundred training sessions connecting indigenous knowledge holders with scientific institutions. By contrast, the Kachung Forest Project in Uganda serves as a contested counter-case: despite formal Clean Development Mechanism certification, contested degradation baselines, restricted access to land, fuelwood, and grazing areas, and limited recognition of customary resource use undermined its legitimacy, showing that carbon accounting cannot compensate for weak procedural inclusion.

The governance analysis identifies two complementary institutional models. Polycentric governance distributes authority across multiple, overlapping centers of decision-making, supporting experimentation, adaptive learning, and context-sensitive responses, with redundancy across centers enhancing resilience. Yet decentralization without coordination may reproduce sectoral silos and existing power asymmetries, or enable elite capture. Nexus governance addresses this weakness by making explicit the interdependencies across biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate, resting on five principles from the IPBES Nexus Assessment: integrative and transdisciplinary framings, inclusive engagement, explicit attention to justice and accountability, cross-scale coordination, and adaptive, reflexive governance. Financial and technological arrangements act as structural filters across all options, with limited concessional finance, high debt burdens, and risk-averse investment restricting implementation in many low- and middle-income settings, while harmful subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries divert resources from renewable and circular pathways.

The authors are careful to acknowledge limitations. The study uses ordinal scoring and qualitative mechanism tracing rather than statistical causal identification, and cannot estimate average treatment effects or universal rankings. Evidence coverage varies across options, regions, and institutional settings, and the expert assessment did not employ blinded independent coding or formal sensitivity analysis. The findings should be read as evidence-supported comparative tendencies rather than deterministic predictions, and the authors call for future research using preregistered systematic review, independent parallel coding, and quantitative sensitivity analysis. Even so, the central inference stands: technical potential alone cannot explain uneven co-benefits across connected systems. Durable outcomes become plausible when institutions coordinate across sectors and scales, distribute benefits and burdens fairly, enable meaningful participation, respect plural knowledge systems, and maintain accountable long-term finance. Climate responses, the study argues, should be evaluated through both their direct effects and the institutional conditions governing their persistence, aligning ecological interdependence with rights, responsibilities, and public accountability.

Subject of Research: Nexus governance and Earth System Justice conditions shaping co-benefits of climate response options across biodiversity, water, food, and health

Article Title: Enabling climate action: A nexus approach for delivering co-benefits across biodiversity, water, food, and health

Article References: Singh, P. K., Gupta, H., Díaz-José, J., McElwee, P. D., Tirado, M. C., Cherubini, F., Duchková, H., Llope, M., Vale, M. M., Khan, S., Ito, A., Hori, M., Eriksen, S. H., Tiwari, L., Phang, S. C., Mason-D’Croz, D., Xu, X., van Huysen, T., Herrero, M., … Smith, P. (2026). Enabling climate action: A nexus approach for delivering co-benefits across biodiversity, water, food, and health. iScience, 29(11), Article 117734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117734

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117734

Keywords: climate change, nexus approach, biodiversity, water, food security, public health, IPBES, Earth System Justice, governance, agroecology, REDD+, indigenous knowledge

The research tackles a deceptively simple question that has long frustrated scholars of public policy: what makes a policy mix work? In an ideal world, the authors explain, policies would display three qualities at once. Goals would be coherent, meaning they reinforce rather than contradict each other. Instruments, the concrete tools governments use, such as subsidies, regulations, taxes and information campaigns, would be consistent, so that one tool does not undermine another. And goals and instruments would be aligned, with each tool actually serving the objective it was designed for. In practice, however, governments rarely design policy mixes from scratch. Instead, as the study puts it, policy mixes are typically patched up to solve problems as they arise, a process that generates ever-greater complexity over time. Whether that complexity helps or hinders the long-term evolution of climate policy has remained stubbornly unclear.

To answer the question, the team adopted a quantitative longitudinal research design, a methodological approach that tracks phenomena across extended time periods rather than taking a single snapshot. They assembled and coded the full corpus of low-carbon policies issued in Shenzhen across 28 years, mapping how the number of policies grew, which policy subdomains emerged, and how individual goals and instruments changed over time. The coding allowed the researchers to classify changes in the policy mix into recognizable patterns familiar from the international policy-design literature: replacement, in which a new policy displaces an old one; conversion, in which an existing instrument is repurposed toward a new goal; and layering, in which new policies are simply stacked on top of existing ones without removing anything. Each pattern carries different implications for how well the overall mix fits together.

The headline finding is that Shenzhen’s low-carbon policy evolution followed a trajectory of gradual accumulation punctuated by two dramatic surges, with the number of policies peaking in 2012 and again in 2021. Those two dates are not accidental. The first surge coincided with Shenzhen’s designation as a national low-carbon pilot zone, part of China’s broader strategy of testing climate policies in selected cities before scaling them nationwide. The second surge aligned with the run-up to and aftermath of China’s national commitments on carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. In both cases, the study finds, the local government was responding directly to national government programs, translating central directives into municipal policy at remarkable speed. Shenzhen’s status as a laboratory for national experimentation thus acted as a powerful engine of policy production, driving the city to accumulate an ever-larger stock of policies across an expanding set of subdomains.

Beneath the aggregate growth, the researchers uncovered a striking asymmetry in how goals and instruments behaved. Policy goals, the study found, evolved rather flexibly, with new goals frequently replacing old ones as political priorities shifted. When Shenzhen’s leadership redefined what the city should achieve, whether industrial upgrading, air quality, or carbon intensity targets, the goal architecture of the policy mix was rewritten accordingly. Policy instruments, by contrast, developed far more incrementally. Rather than being swept away when priorities changed, existing tools tended to persist, undergoing replacement, conversion, or layering. This means that Shenzhen’s policy mix carries the sediment of its own history: instruments introduced decades ago for entirely different purposes have been bent toward low-carbon ends, while newer instruments sit atop older ones, sometimes reinforcing them and sometimes working at cross-purposes.

The distribution of these policy dynamics turned out to be roughly balanced between good fits and poor fits. Replacement, the pattern in which a new policy cleanly supersedes an outdated one, represented a good fit between new policies and the existing mix, keeping the toolkit relatively coherent. Conversion and layering, on the other hand, represented poor fits, adding complexity without necessarily resolving contradictions. Crucially, the study shows that these dynamics varied not only across different policy subdomains but also within them, meaning that even a single domain such as transport or buildings could contain a patchwork of well-integrated and poorly integrated instruments. This granularity matters, because it suggests that assessments of policy quality cannot rely on aggregate indicators alone; the internal texture of a policy mix determines whether its growing complexity translates into effective climate action or bureaucratic clutter.

What drove this evolution? The researchers identify three key factors. The first is the city’s strategic positioning: Shenzhen’s identity as China’s flagship special economic zone and its self-image as an innovation hub created strong incentives to be first with new policy ideas, including in the low-carbon sphere. The second is the focus of local leadership, since shifting priorities among municipal leaders redirected attention and resources across subdomains over time. The third, and perhaps most consequential, is the city’s response to national policies. Shenzhen did not develop its low-carbon agenda in isolation; it operated within a nested system in which central government programs, pilot designations, and evaluation schemes shaped local ambitions. The interplay between central directives and local experimentation produced the characteristic rhythm of the city’s policy history, with bursts of legislative activity following each national signal.

The practical results of this policy machine are visible on Shenzhen’s streets. The city has achieved one of the highest penetrations of new energy vehicles of any major city in the world, with the share of new-energy vehicles among new car sales exceeding 60 percent according to local reports cited in the study’s reference material. Shenzhen electrified its entire bus fleet years ahead of most global cities, a feat that required the coordinated deployment of subsidies, procurement rules, charging infrastructure standards, and industrial policy. The study’s framework helps explain how such coordination emerged not from a single master plan but from the iterative layering and conversion of instruments over many years, with each new policy responding to gaps and frictions left by its predecessors.

For the international policy community, the Shenzhen case carries a message that is both sobering and encouraging. Sobering, because it confirms what scholars such as Michael Howlett and colleagues have long argued: real policy mixes are rarely the product of rational, comprehensive design. They are mosaics, assembled incrementally, with goals that churn and instruments that linger. The democratic responsiveness trap identified in the policy-accumulation literature, in which governments keep adding policies to signal action without ever dismantling old ones, has a counterpart even in a technocratic, fast-moving city like Shenzhen. Encouraging, because the case demonstrates that a policy mix can nonetheless deliver transformative outcomes despite its imperfections, provided that goals remain broadly coherent, leadership attention is sustained, and the local system stays tightly coupled to national strategic signals.

The study also opens new avenues for research. Its quantitative longitudinal design, coding decades of policy texts to track coherence, consistency and alignment over time, offers a template that could be applied to other cities and other policy fields, from circular economy initiatives, which Ma and colleagues have analyzed previously, to waste management and energy transition policy across China’s provinces. As countries worldwide race to meet mid-century decarbonization targets, understanding how policy mixes actually evolve, rather than how they should evolve in theory, may prove decisive. Shenzhen’s 28-year experiment suggests that the path to a low-carbon future is not a straight line of elegant design but a winding process of patching, layering and occasional replacement, and that cities able to manage that process with strategic clarity may outpace those waiting for the perfect plan.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal analysis of low-carbon policy evolution, coherence, consistency and goal-instrument alignment in Shenzhen, China, from 1994 to 2022

Article Title: Policy evolution through coherence, consistency and alignment: the Shenzhen low carbon policy case

Article References: Ma, W., Hoppe, T., & Sun, T. (2025). Policy evolution through coherence, consistency and alignment: the Shenzhen low carbon policy case. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 24-45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-024-00103-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-024-00103-7

Keywords: Shenzhen, low-carbon policy, policy mix, policy coherence, policy instruments, policy layering, policy accumulation, climate governance, China, urban policy, policy design, longitudinal analysis

The study draws on the GLOBE survey, an online questionnaire titled “International Organizations and the Future of Global Governance” administered between May and November 2021. The survey reached 1,004 staff members across 30 international organizations, with an 8.4 percent response rate that matches comparable elite surveys in the field. For this analysis, the authors narrowed the sample to 451 responses from four critical global governance sectors: trade, finance, security and climate change. Respondents were carefully selected—only secretariat members with policy-related roles were included, excluding purely administrative personnel, consultants and locally hired staff. To validate the sample, the researchers compared its demographic composition against official UN staff statistics covering 116,388 employees from 38 organizations, finding a reasonable approximation of the broader international civil service.

The survey’s first major contribution is a new empirical variable: perceived autonomy. Respondents rated, on a five-point scale, how autonomous their organization is from the influence of individual member states across five policy functions—settling disputes between member states, setting policies and strategies, reviewing internal operations, establishing organizational norms, and ensuring compliance. The results reveal moderate autonomy overall, with a weighted mean of 2.92, just below the midpoint of the scale. Scores across the 18 organizations analyzed ranged from 2.2 to 3.5, indicating meaningful variation but no dramatic outliers. Notably, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade scored highest at 3.5, followed closely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group at 3.49, the International Organization of Securities Commissions at 3.4, and DG CLIMA at 3.32. At the bottom of the ranking sat the Financial Stability Board at 2.2, NATO at 2.3, and the OSCE and Mercosur, both at 2.6.

Perhaps the most technically interesting finding concerns where autonomy is strongest and weakest within organizations. Staff perceive their institutions as most autonomous in reviewing internal operations, with a mean of 3.27, and in norm-setting, at 3.26. This suggests that international bureaucracies enjoy considerable discretion over their own administrative machinery, largely insulated from direct state interference. Autonomy drops sharply, however, in functions that expose organizations to external political pressure. Policy-setting scores a mean of just 2.62, and dispute resolution between member states falls to the lowest level at 2.57. In other words, the closer an organization’s activity moves to the contested politics of its member states, the less independent its staff feel—a pattern consistent with principal-agent theory, which holds that states retain their tightest control over the most consequential delegations of authority.

The researchers benchmarked these perceptions against two established quantitative datasets: the International Authority Database, which measures de jure authority across seven policy functions, and the Measure of International Authority dataset, which tracks delegation and pooling of legal authority. The comparison produced instructive convergences and divergences. The security sector scored lowest in both datasets—0.25 in the IAD and 0.27 in MIA delegation—and staff perceptions confirmed this, with a sector mean of 2.68, the lowest of the four. Trade, which ranks highest in MIA delegation at 0.44, delivered a correspondingly high perceived autonomy of 3.17. But the within-sector variation proved more striking than the between-sector differences. The finance sector contains both one of the most autonomous organizations in the sample, IOSCO at 3.4, and one of the least, the Financial Stability Board at 2.2. Similarly, trade spans the entire spectrum, from DG TRADE at the top to Mercosur near the bottom.

The study’s second axis examined horizontal interactions—how staff perceive their dealings with other international organizations. Here the findings challenge a core assumption of the regime complexity literature. Scholars have long warned that dense, overlapping governance architectures produce “governance congestion”: conflicting mandates, coordination failures and institutional rivalry that degrade policy outcomes. Yet when asked to rate challenges such as overlapping responsibilities, implementation of field actions, hierarchical relations, competition and the involvement of too many actors, staff reported relatively few problems. The weighted overall score was 3.72 on a five-point scale where higher values indicate fewer difficulties—clearly above the midpoint and closer to “somewhat problematic” than to genuinely problematic. Mercosur, the WTO and IOSCO reported the smoothest inter-organizational relations, while the African Union at 2.99 and UNEP at 3.18 reported the most friction.

Sectoral patterns in these interactions are statistically robust. Trade organizations reported the fewest challenges, with a sector mean of 3.97, followed by finance at 3.81, security at 3.71 and climate change at 3.46. Pairwise t-tests confirmed that most of these differences are significant, with the largest gap between trade and climate change, where the t-statistic reached approximately 12.19. Within the issue-level breakdown, the implementation of field actions was the least problematic challenge overall, with a weighted mean of 3.92, while the involvement of too many actors was the most troublesome at 3.39. This last finding is telling: it suggests that the primary friction in global governance is not rivalry between organizations but sheer institutional crowding—too many players at the table, particularly in the fragmented climate regime, where UNFCCC and UNEP staff both flagged actor proliferation as a leading concern.

The sector-specific results map closely onto what institutional theory would predict, with some surprises. In finance, the pillar-like structure of the sector—where IOSCO monopolizes securities regulation and the Bank for International Settlements occupies a unique niche with no direct competitors—translated into minimal reported inter-organizational conflict. The IMF scored 3.01 on perceived autonomy versus the BIS at 2.73, confirming that the Fund enjoys greater internal discretion, especially over reviewing its own operations, but remains constrained in dispute resolution and policy-setting, echoing scholarship that portrays the IMF as a negotiation arena shaped by powerful members. In security, the dominance of member states and the veto politics of the UN Security Council produced the lowest autonomy perceptions, with NATO and the OSCE particularly exposed—though the IAEA, acting as a coordinating body, bucked the trend. The African Union emerged as the sample’s clearest case of governance congestion, reporting the highest difficulties across overlapping mandates, competition and crowded coordination spaces.

The climate change sector delivered the study’s most sobering portrait. Consistent with the fragmentation literature pioneered by scholars like Keohane and Victor, climate staff reported the most problematic interactions of any sector, driven by hierarchical tensions, competition and the proliferation of actors ranging from UN bodies to city networks like C40. Yet the sector also displayed a sharp internal divide: DG CLIMA and C40 staff perceived high autonomy, while UN institutions recorded significantly lower scores. Taken together, the findings suggest that fears of systemic governance congestion may be overstated for well-structured, functionally specialized regimes like trade and finance, but remain valid for fragmented domains like climate and security. The authors frame their study as an exploratory first step, calling for longitudinal research on how budget changes, external political shocks and shifting ideologies in key member states translate into the internal behavior of international bureaucracies—and ultimately into the policy outcomes that affect us all.

Subject of Research: Perceived autonomy and inter-organizational interactions among international organization staff across global governance sectors

Article Title: Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions

Article References: Holesch, A., Jordana, J., Marx, A., & Schmitt, L. (2025). Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 205-228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Keywords: international organizations, global governance, bureaucratic autonomy, regime complexity, GLOBE survey, WTO, IMF, climate governance, security governance, trade governance, international bureaucracies, member states

The underlying chemistry is elegant. Seawater’s capacity to store carbon dioxide is governed by its total alkalinity, essentially the charge balance of carbonate and bicarbonate ions dissolved in it. When alkaline minerals such as olivine, limestone, quicklime, hydrated lime, steel slag or magnesium hydroxide dissolve in seawater, they shift the carbonate equilibrium: carbon dioxide is converted into bicarbonate and carbonate ions, lowering the partial pressure of CO2 at the sea surface and drawing more of the gas in from the atmosphere. Because the added alkalinity is conservative, meaning it persists in the water until consumed by other reactions, the stored carbon can remain out of the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. This durability is what makes OAE attractive compared with biological approaches such as tree planting, where stored carbon can be released by a single fire.

Yet the authors argue that the field’s obsession with gigatonne-scale potential has distorted research priorities and public expectations. Instead, they propose a portfolio approach: many different OAE pathways, each matched to the local environment where it makes sense. Spreading crushed olivine on sandy beaches might suit one coastline; discharging alkalinity from wastewater treatment plants or desalination facilities might suit another; electrochemical methods that split seawater or accelerate carbonate dissolution on ships could serve shipping lanes; and adding alkaline minerals to organic-rich sediments, as experiments in the Baltic Sea suggest, could tap into benthic weathering processes. The diversity of pathways, the team writes, favours implementation across heterogeneous coastal environments, with upscaling achieved through widespread bottom-up adoption rather than centralized rollout.

A central claim of the Perspective is that the intended increase in seawater bicarbonate and carbonate shows no tendency to be inherently harmful within plausible limits. This is a striking statement, because the ocean is already suffering from the opposite problem: acidification. By raising alkalinity, OAE would partially reverse the pH decline that threatens corals, shellfish and calcifying plankton. Indeed, historical precedent exists. Lime has been used in aquaculture ponds for decades to manage pH, control pests such as starfish, and improve conditions for farmed shellfish and abalone, providing a long, largely overlooked record of alkalinity addition to coastal waters.

But harmless bicarbonate is not the whole story. The authors emphasize that collateral perturbations tend to drive the real environmental risk. Dissolving certain minerals can cause transient pH and CO2 excursions in the immediate vicinity of deployment. Mineral powders add suspended solids that can smother or abrade organisms. Some alkaline materials, notably steel slag and olivine, release trace metals such as nickel, chromium and copper, and several recent experiments have shown that these can influence plankton communities in pathway-specific ways. Land-based life-cycle impacts matter too: mining, grinding, transporting and dispersing minerals consumes energy and generates emissions, and life-cycle assessments show that a poorly designed OAE operation could erode or even negate its own carbon benefit. Environmental assessment, the team argues, should therefore focus on these pathway-specific local effects rather than on the added carbonate chemistry itself.

One of the most technically intriguing sections of the paper concerns sediments. Because most practical OAE deployments will occur near heterogeneous coastal sediments, their effectiveness will depend heavily on what happens at the seafloor. Sediments are not inert. They host natural alkalinity production through carbonate dissolution, silicate weathering, sulfate reduction and pyrite burial. Added alkaline minerals can interact with these processes in complicated ways: secondary minerals may precipitate and consume the very alkalinity that was added, a phenomenon known as runaway carbonate precipitation that laboratory studies have shown can be triggered when aragonite supersaturation exceeds critical thresholds. Conversely, alkaline additions may stimulate natural benthic weathering, amplifying the carbon removal beyond what the added mineral alone would deliver. There is also an additionality problem: anthropogenic alkalinity can suppress natural alkalinity-generating processes, so the net removal is smaller than the gross addition. Recent work on anthropogenic seafloor disturbances, such as bottom trawling, has even revealed that alkalinity destruction in disturbed sediments generates hidden CO2 emissions, underscoring how sensitive the coastal alkalinity budget is.

Verifying that a local OAE project actually removed the carbon it claims is perhaps the hardest problem of all. The added alkalinity draws down atmospheric CO2 only gradually, as air-sea equilibration takes months to years and depends on wind, temperature and mixing. Meanwhile, the ocean’s background carbonate chemistry varies enormously with season, currents and biological activity. The authors call for integrated, site-specific observation programs and high-resolution models that can distinguish a project-scale carbon removal signal from this natural variability and quantify uncertainty transparently. Nested coastal models, such as one recently developed for Halifax Harbour, illustrate the kind of local simulation that will be needed. Emerging carbon-removal registries and the first OAE credits have already highlighted how contested verification methodologies remain, and the paper argues that accounting rules must be locally grounded and openly documented to support trust.

Governance is the third pillar of the rethink. The authors argue that global geoengineering frameworks, centred on the London Convention and Protocol and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, are poorly suited to regulating thousands of small coastal deployments. Instead, they envision locally grounded regulation, community co-design and transparent carbon accounting, with projects shaped by the governments, Indigenous communities, aquaculturists and coastal residents who will live alongside them. Social science research shows that public acceptance hinges on exactly this kind of local involvement; surveys and scenario studies across several countries indicate that communities evaluate marine carbon removal not only on environmental risk but on procedural fairness, economic benefit and who controls the technology. The authors also stress humility: research suggests OAE could contribute to climate mitigation, but major uncertainties persist, and rigorous assessment must continue as deployments grow.

The practical vision sketched in the Perspective is, notably, consistent with what is already happening in the real world. Early commercial deployments have been small, coastal and locally negotiated, from shoreline mineral dispersal trials to ship-based experiments in the North Atlantic, and buyers have purchased modest volumes of removal credits rather than betting on gigatonne promises. Whether this bottom-up mosaic can deliver meaningful climate impact remains an open question, and the authors are careful not to overpromise. But their message is clear: the future of ocean alkalinity enhancement will be written not in one sweeping global treaty or one planetary intervention, but in hundreds of carefully monitored, environmentally responsible, demonstrably carbon-negative projects, each designed for the particular stretch of coast where it operates. For a field that has oscillated between utopian hype and reflexive dismissal, that shift from planetary dream to local practice may be the most important recalibration yet.

Subject of Research: Ocean alkalinity enhancement as a localized marine carbon dioxide removal strategy

Article Title: Rethinking ocean alkalinity enhancement

Article References: Rethinking ocean alkalinity enhancement. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00828-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43017-026-00828-5

Keywords: ocean alkalinity enhancement, carbon dioxide removal, marine biogeochemistry, coastal ecosystems, enhanced weathering, carbon verification, ocean acidification, sediment chemistry, climate governance, geoengineering, carbon markets, marine carbon dioxide removal

The study, authored by Yixian Sun and Yitong Ye of the University of Bath, examines how Trump’s second-term anti-climate agenda is reconfiguring global climate governance and how different actors around the world are responding. Their central claim is that the architecture of global climate action has become polycentric, meaning that authority is distributed across many overlapping centers, including national governments, subnational states, cities, businesses, and transnational networks. Because no single actor, not even the world’s largest economy, dominates the system, the withdrawal of one major player cannot collapse the whole regime. The researchers compare this to a safety net: when one strand fails, the others hold the structure together.

The scale of the American retreat is nonetheless unprecedented. Unlike the first Trump administration, whose rollbacks were largely regulatory and reversible, the 2025 agenda targets structural foundations. Beyond the Paris exit, the administration suspended disbursement of tax credits and funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest public investment program in US history, which had mobilized roughly 370 billion dollars for renewable and zero-emission technologies. Federal policy has been reoriented toward expanding domestic oil, gas, and coal production under banners of energy dominance and economic security, deepening what the authors call the structural lock-in of a high-carbon economy.

The rollback has even extended to pressuring private climate action. In August 2025, 23 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the Science Based Targets initiative, a global standard-setter for corporate net zero commitments, demanding disclosures about its governance and membership on antitrust and consumer protection grounds. The researchers note that such threats from subnational governments to non-state climate initiatives are unprecedented and could deter US-based companies from pursuing decarbonization. Meanwhile, a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance and the closure of USAID terminated more than 150 climate-related contracts and grants worth roughly 1.2 billion dollars, while the administration rescinded 4 billion dollars previously pledged to the Green Climate Fund and withdrew from the Loss and Damage Fund.

These cuts strike hardest at developing countries, which have long relied on American finance to access clean technologies, build institutional capacity, and manage climate-induced losses. The authors frame this as a philosophical shift in US foreign policy, away from cooperative leadership based on providing global public goods and toward coercive influence exercised through punitive measures such as tariffs. In the Trumpist worldview, international commitments are constraints on American sovereignty, and climate finance is a zero-sum transaction that benefits other countries at America’s expense. The resulting trade tensions, particularly with China, the principal supplier of clean technologies, have raised costs for solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles in the US market.

Yet the multilateral system has refused to buckle. No other member state has followed the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Instead, most countries have continued updating their Nationally Determined Contributions, the five-yearly pledges that form the treaty’s ratcheting mechanism. By early November 2025, 108 parties excluding the US had officially submitted their 2035 targets, together accounting for 65.3 percent of global emissions and 55.3 percent of the world’s population. In July 2025, China and the European Union jointly committed to submit enhanced 2035 pledges before the COP30 summit and to demonstrate shared leadership in advancing net zero transitions.

China’s announcement on 24 September 2025 was particularly consequential. President Xi Jinping pledged emission reductions of 7 to 10 percent below peak levels by 2035, an increase in non-fossil fuels to more than 30 percent of energy consumption, and an expansion of wind and solar capacity to over six times 2020 levels. Although analysts debate the ambition of these targets, it marks the first time China has promised an absolute cap on its greenhouse gas emissions, and the country may overperform given its current pace of clean energy deployment. Brazil, meanwhile, has pledged to cut emissions 59 to 67 percent below 2005 levels by 2035 and intends to use its COP30 presidency to keep global ambition aligned with the Paris goals.

Within the United States itself, subnational and non-state actors are sustaining momentum. Twenty-four states and territories have formed the US Climate Alliance, representing nearly 60 percent of the national economy, and have collectively reaffirmed a net zero target of reducing emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. States such as California, Washington, and Massachusetts continue to operate renewable portfolio standards, cap-and-trade systems, and electric vehicle mandates. Even Republican-leaning Texas, the largest oil and gas producing state, has become a renewable powerhouse, holding more than 26 percent of US wind capacity in 2022 and attracting over 21 billion dollars in solar investment by early 2023. City networks like C40, which includes 14 major American cities, have pledged to remain bastions of climate progress, and the share of large US companies adopting net zero targets has continued to rise even during Trump’s second term.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of resilience comes from the Global South, where cheap solar technology is driving a consumer-led energy revolution. In Nigeria, savings from reduced diesel imports allow solar panels to pay for themselves within six months. In Sierra Leone, imported panels could generate electricity equivalent to 61 percent of the country’s 2023 output if fully installed. Pakistan recorded one of the fastest solar expansions in history by importing 16 gigawatts of panels during 2024 alone. With American climate finance gone, new funding sources are filling the gap, most notably China, which provided an estimated 3 billion dollars annually for developing country climate action between 2015 and 2021 and has pledged overseas green investments of up to 71.6 billion dollars, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative since 2022.

The Bath researchers conclude that Trumpism has limited purchase on a polycentric system in which many actors have strong, increasingly economic incentives to decarbonize. Climate politics, they argue, is no longer primarily a collective action problem but a distributional one, with countries and firms competing for the benefits of clean energy markets. As climate impacts intensify and green technology costs fall, the actors positioned to gain from transition are strengthening their commitments rather than abandoning them. The long-term consequences of America’s retreat remain uncertain, and the damage to US decarbonization and to vulnerable countries is real. But the evidence assembled suggests that the global net zero machine, powered by major emitters, American states and cities, corporations, and Chinese capital, will keep turning regardless of what happens in Washington.

Subject of Research: The resilience of polycentric global climate governance under the second Trump administration's climate policy rollback

Article Title: Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0

Article References: Sun, Y., & Ye, Y. (2025). Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Keywords: climate governance, Paris Agreement, Trump administration, net zero, polycentricity, climate finance, China, Nationally Determined Contributions, US Climate Alliance, renewable energy, Global South, COP30