Climate change inequality analysis in future inequality diagnostics

The series of country-level inequality diagnostics published by ACEIR and partners since 2019 can now be extended to the critical area of climate inequality analysis where national data are available. This exciting development follows the centre’s longstanding partnership with Agence Française du Développement (AFD) that has resulted in the parallel development of two important guides on undertaking such analysis.

The first is a new research paper, Inequality and climate change: Measuring interlinkages to inform equitable climate policy, that discusses the relationship between climate change and socioeconomic inequality. With this paper, AFD and ACEIR researchers contribute to a still limited number of analytical frameworks and empirical tools that jointly address the interlinkages between the dimensions of climate change and socioeconomic inequality.

Explains the paper’s lead author, Rawane Yasser, economist at AFD and ACEIR research affiliate:

“The interlinkages between inequality and climate change are now widely acknowledged. But the tools and frameworks to measure and assess them jointly are few and often limited to specific dimensions, such as carbon inequality and climate vulnerability. Our paper gives detailed attention to these linkages and to identifying the most relevant indicators to measure them in different country contexts.

"The aim is to help inform key policy issues and choices that deal with climate inequality. The proposed framework presented in the paper can assist both equitable international climate cooperation and national policy strategies for inclusive and climate-resilient development.”

This analytical framework is used in a second inequality diagnostic for South Africa that is currently underway in partnership with Statistics South Africa.

But it is not about repeating that the rich emit more and the poor are more exposed, says ACEIR affiliate Dr Anda David, the AFD’s lead economist on inequalities:
 

“The real novelty is that we treat the climate transition as part of the inequality story – not as a separate environmental chapter." 

"By putting emissions, exposure, assets and adaptive capacity into the same analytical frame, we can see where a country’s growth model is both carbon-intensive and reinforcing inequality. That opens space for discussions on more coherent structural reform.”

ACEIR researcher Dr Muna Shifa points out that measuring climate change-related inequality is challenging and complex because of the multidimensionality of both climate change and inequalities:

“Economic inequality can be measured with single proxy indicators such as income and wealth. But there are no standard indicators, or estimation approaches, available for measuring climate change inequality.”

These analytical challenges are discussed in a new revised version of the Handbook on inequality measurement for country studies, which now includes a section on measuring climate inequality.

The handbook, which serves as a guide for researchers who want to undertake a country-level inequality diagnostic, was developed by Dr Shifa and Prof. Vimal Ranchhod, both from the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), University of Cape Town.

“While our research paper unpacks the relationship between climate change and inequality and discusses the complexities of measuring climate inequality, the new section in the handbook explains what is possible to measure practically and discusses some of the methods used to measure climate change-related inequality”, explains Dr Shifa.
 

The handbook describes two components of analysing climate inequality: analysing unequal contributions to climate change, and analysing unequal impacts of climate change.

Unequal contributions to climate change analysis are usually based on countries’ greenhouse gas (CO2) emissions, which can be measured cumulatively over time (stock of CO2 emissions), or annual per capita emissions (contemporary CO2 emissions) to highlight disparities in greenhouse production between countries. Unequal contributions by social groups within a country can also be measured by per capita emissions.

As for unequal impacts of climate change, the handbook explains how such impacts are measured by their effects on different segments of society. These can be primary effects (known as “climate-related hazards” such as droughts and flooding, for example). Such climate hazards can have secondary effects that have negative socioeconomic consequences, for example flooding that destroys properties and livelihoods and possibly leads to poor health from waterborne diseases. The measurement of such effects in turn can focus on the extent to which individuals or society are exposed to or are affected by exposure to climate-related hazards. 

The English version of the revised handbook is available online, while including the climate inequality section in the French version is in the pipeline.

The research paper was authored by Rawane Yasser, Muna Shifa, Anda David, Murray Leibbrandt, Vimal Ranchhod, and Harald Winkler.