In 2015, countries agreed to reduce their emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement temperature goal of keeping emissions well below 2 degrees Celsius. This gave birth to the net zero framework, which has seen the adoption of net zero targets by countries, corporates and other institutions globally. In this session, Jessica will talk about the history of net zero, how it is used today and what the future looks like for the framework. She will highlight why we need equity and justice in climate action that is defined by net zero. Lastly, she will talk about how equity and justice considerations have evolved in net zero standards and guidance, and what the future holds for equitable and just net zero.
Biography
Jessica is a Research Fellow on Inclusive Net Zero within Oxford University's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She has also been appointed as the Oxford Net Zero Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. Together with Prof Javier Lezaun and Dr. Radhika Khosla, Jessica leads ONZ’s research on how net zero can be made to be more inclusive, spearheading engagement with stakeholders in the Global South to outline pathways to inclusive net zero strategies, policies and actions. Jessica comes to this role with extensive research and practitioner experience. Jessica has led research on climate finance, climate justice and equity climate finance and governance of climate change adaptation. She has also managed development and resilience programming in the Global South. She has previously worked with international finance institutions such as the Green Climate Fund and international NGOs such as Mercy Corps and CARE International, and has developed a regional expertise from work in Sub-Saharan Africa. Jessica has a PhD in climate justice and equity in climate finance from the University of Reading (2020).
A consistent thread through Jessica's scholarship is a concern with the justice dimensions of mitigation and adaptation — including recent calls for more democratic and locally meaningful adaptation finance and critical reflections on country ownership and stakeholder inclusion in development pathways. Her more recent work spans a number of urgent global challenges: from interrogating the inclusivity and justice of carbon markets and climate finance mechanisms, to advancing context-specific evidence frameworks for African clean energy futures, to evaluating the governance levers needed to ensure equity in climate adaptation policy at both national and local levels.