A Climate-Resilient Future Is an Equitable, Just Future
Ed Carr, PhD
Director and Professor, International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark University
Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation account for about 28 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. As we work together to address the profound climate crisis, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s new speaker series, Innovation for a Sustainable, Equitable Transportation System, is exploring how to transition to a low-/no-carbon transportation system—one that enables disadvantaged communities to gain access to mobility, jobs, and economic opportunity.
Ed Carr, PhD, director and professor in the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark University, presented his talk, “A Climate-Resilient Future Is an Equitable, Just Future,” as part of the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s 2021 speaker series, Innovation for a Sustainable, Equitable Transportation System, on Tuesday, June 8, 2021.
Climate change poses immediate and rapidly growing systemic risks to human well-being. Solutions to this crisis often focus on the identification of new technologies that can mitigate or even remove emissions while protecting us from now-inevitable impacts, and in our urgency, questions of equity and justice are often pushed aside. This is a fundamentally misguided framing of the climate challenge and its solutions, as climate resilient future depends on attention to and increased achievement of social equity and justice.
About the Speaker
Professor Ed Carr is the Director of the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark University. He also founded and directs the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL), a research unit at Clark dedicated to bridging basic research and its application to real-world challenges. The author of more than 70 publications on issues of global development, livelihoods, adaptation to climate change, and the changing global environment, Carr’s work focuses on achieving meaningful and enduring improvements to human well-being in a changing, uncertain world.
Beyond academia, Carr has worked as a policy advisor with and scientific advisor to development donors and multilateral organizations. He is currently the Panel Member for Climate Change Adaptation on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. Previously, he served as the first climate change coordinator for USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, and later an adviser on the Climate Change Team in USAID’s Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and the Environment and an adaptation advisor for the World Bank’s Zambia Pilot Program in Climate Resilience. Carr has also served as the lead author of two prior global environmental assessments, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and The United Nations Environment Programme's Fourth Global Environment Outlook. Carr is currently a lead author for Working Group II of the current Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
News and Video
Read the news story and watch video highlights of Carr's talk from this event.