The central tasks of this research team are:

  • ensuring integration between the TSITICA project’s different research areas; 
  • recognising and boosting innovation; 
  • identifying high-profile results emerging from and between the different themes; 
  • maximising synergies; 
  • synthesising key findings; and 
  • communicating these key messages to ensure aggregate impact. 

Capacity building on interdisciplinary and synthesis praxis for the research team and facilitating discussions on the integration of research themes are central to this work.

The project is structured in five research themes. The first theme, Governance of climate change, social inequality and sustainable livelihoods, investigates how dynamics of inequalities shape climate policy outcomes. The second theme, Multi-scale dynamics in inequality data that matter for climate compatible livelihoods, investigates the dynamics of inequalities in relation to climate interventions. 

The following themes investigate the impacts of climate interventions at different levels: 

The third theme, Future climate response options, portfolios and pathways that leverage co-benefits for the Sustainable Development Goals, produces a systematic database of climate projects and investigates their impacts on inequalities. The next theme, on Unpacking livelihood and equity outcomes of place-based climate change interventions: Practitioner perspectives, looks at the same direction of inquiry at the community and household level. The fifth theme, Distributional impacts of climate action, models overarching national level interventions and the macro-economic distributional impacts.

The integration of the research streams offers alignment in terms of the selection of the case studies. The aim is to investigate similar interventions across the different research themes, ranging from interventions to mitigate and adapt to the consequences of climate change.

Team

  • Murray Leibbrandt, University of Cape Town
  • Sarah Mander, University of Manchester
  • Mark New (team leader), University of Cape Town
  • Britta Rennkamp, University of Cape Town
  • And the full project team (as appropriate)