Atmospheric pollutants, fossil fuels, and climate finance and policies travel across borders, but their effects manifest unevenly in different places. These effects are conditioned by situated histories and existing patterns of social differentiation and uneven development that make factors like gender, race, caste, class, age, citizenship, disability, and the intersections between them variously important to the production of climate injustice. In other words, while climate change may be a global phenomenon, climate injustices are not the same everywhere. Thus, examining what makes people vulnerable to injury, to what they must adapt, and why are essential for disrupting the historical and ongoing drivers of uneven environmental harm.
crops like rice are sensitive to changes in temperature and precipitation
Vulnerability
My work on vulnerability adopts a relational view of security to show how the security of some groups comes at the expense of others (Global Environmental Change 2019). It builds on research that identifies differential vulnerability to climate change as a function of primarily social rather than physical factors (WIREs Climate Change 2019).
Grounded in household-based research in the Mekong and Ganges Deltas, this work asks: How is vulnerability to climate change socially and spatially distributed? How do climate change programs intervene in this landscape of vulnerability and with what effects? Do climate change adaptation measures reduce vulnerability to climate change-related hazards? Through a study of water infrastructure and agricultural diversification projects, we find that contemporary environmental vulnerability is a function of both past landscape interventions and actively unfolding climatic change (Climate and Development 2019). Despite growing appreciation for historical underpinnings of present-day vulnerabilities, prevailing approaches to socio-ecological hazards are too often synchronic and reductive (Environmental Scientist 2019), thus leading to the omission of important drivers of human vulnerability and migration (Annals of the AAG 2022, UH Press 2025).
Adaptation
Adaptation is inextricably linked to vulnerability, as the efficacy of any adaptation measure is largely measured by the extent to which it reduces people’s vulnerability to climate impacts. However, adaptation interventions have overwhelmingly been incremental and piecemeal. Their failure to eliminate the structural causes of climate vulnerability lies in the delivery of adaptation in the form of projects. As socially-, spatially-, and temporally-bounded interventions, projects narrowly designate beneficiaries at the expense of nearby communities and future generations (Climate Policy 2025). Instead, transformative adaptation is more likely to include practices that stretch standard conceptions of adaptation, such as reparations and collective resource governance (Nature Climate Change 2025). Entrenched interests, however, create roadblocks to meaningful change, and thereby perpetuate climate injustices at multiple scales (Oxford University Press 2025).
the adoption of shrimp farming perpetuates social and environmental exploitation under the guise of climate adaptation
Physical infrastructures, like sluice gates and sea walls, are a common target for adaptation finance.
Political economy
My work on the political economy of adaptation attends to both the funding invested in adaptation efforts and the treatment of adaptation as an investment opportunity.
Adaptation finance
While adaptation finance only comprises one-fifth of all climate finance flows, its proponents frame it as crucial funding for addressing climate impacts, especially in lower-income countries. I examine how the framing of environmental hazards affects the solutions that are advanced to address them and how foreign-financed solutions in turn influence wider socio-ecological and political-economic processes. Part of this work entails interrogating the overlapping goals of economic growth and climate change adaptation in the Mekong Delta. Here, I find that mandates to increase competitiveness pervade adaptation programming and thereby perpetuate inequality (Development and Change 2023).
Accumulation by adaptation
The distribution of adaptation finance is animated in part by the growth of a so-called ‘climate adaptation market,’ which frames some groups’ vulnerability to climate change as profitable business opportunities. Beyond expecting returns on their investments into adaptation measures, private sector and government actors benefit from the appropriation of land, resources, and labor. Together, ‘accumulation by adaptation’ encompasses eight mechanisms by which political and economic elites extract value from adaptation interventions (Geography Compass 2024).