Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, with significant impacts on health, inequality, and poverty. As the world grapples with these issues, it is crucial to understand the multifaceted nature of climate-related inequalities in order to design strategies that effectively address them. This event aims to stimulate a discussion around the conceptualisation but also practical cases of the impact of pollution on health, inequality. Join us at Seminar Room 1 at ODID for a fascinating discussion with our special guests Sandra Aguilar, Sabina Alkire, Laura Rival, and Raffaele Ippolito.
About the Speakers:
Sandra Aguilar is Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global Transformation at UC San Diego. Her work mainly focuses on environmental, gender, health and development economics, often exploring the intersections between these fields, while her research seeks to understand the consequences of environmental degradation and the challenges governments face in implementing policies in contexts with underlying structural inequalities or weak institutions. The geographic scope of Professor Aguilar’s work spans several regions including Mexico, Colombia, the United States, Cambodia, and Tanzania. She holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University.
Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at ODID. Her research interests include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, the measurement of freedoms and human development. Together with Professor James Foster, she developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator. She holds a DPhil in Economics, an Msc in Economics for Development and an MPhil in Christian Political Ethics from the University of Oxford.
Laura Rival is Professor of Anthropology of Development at ODID. Her empirically grounded, theoretically oriented and policy-relevant research aims to renew our thinking about the relationship between environment and society. Empirically, her work is grounded in ethnographic research with the Huaorani (Ecuadorian Amazon), inter-disciplinary research with the Makushi (central Guyana), and policy-oriented research with a number of Latin American indigenous and peasant communities, both in Central and South America. Theoretically, she has engaged critically with a range of deterministic assumptions associated with modernist ideologies , as well as with various theories that reify the nature/ culture divide, or perpetuate dubious interpretations of indigenous and peasant livelihoods and their historical dynamics. She has also contributed to political economic analyses of development policies, as well as to discussions surrounding policy instruments aimed at reconciling human development and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Her current research builds on this expertise to address burning issues of development in the face of severe environmental degradation and accelerating climate change.
Raffaele Ippolito is a doctoral researcher studying the everyday experiences of industrial pollution and illness in fence-line communities. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship, his research is situated at the intersection of citizen science, political ecology and environmental justice. Raffaele holds a BA in Social Anthropology and Development Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MSc in Global Health from Taipei Medical University. Prior to joining Oxford, he carried out research on gender equality in health at the United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health and on Chinese migrants in the UK at Regent’s University London.
