Q&A: Harnessing climate investments to serve development goals Stephanie Baum Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Climate pledges are designed to help countries reduce emissions and adapt to a changing climate, but the current iterations of these pledges place additional stresses on vulnerable nations, an international team of researchers co-led by University of Michigan Engineering and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has shown. Pledges such as those laid out in the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda are increasingly shaping broader decisions about economic growth, public health, energy systems, food security and natural resource management. In nations with fewer resources, this can mean climate policy comes at the expense of other public goods like economic development and public health, whereas in industrialized countries, climate action can boost these other areas.

In a recent publication in Nature Communications, researchers coordinated by Ricardo Vinuesa, a U-M associate professor of aerospace engineering, examined how countries around the world are balancing climate goals with broader development priorities. In addition to first and corresponding author Francesca Larosa, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH and researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, the international collaboration included experts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Alicante in Spain. The team analyzed 158 national climate pledges submitted under the Paris Agreement, using a large language model to identify patterns.

The researchers reviewed and verified the results, developing connections between how countries intend to contribute to the global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and broader goals, known as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which cover health, food, water, energy, jobs and environmental protection. They examined how climate plans support or conflict with these goals. Revealing the unfair burden of trade-offs experienced by less wealthy countries, the findings provide new insight into how climate policies may shape development pathways, global inequality, climate finance and international cooperation.

The research team combined expertise in climate policy, sustainable development, artificial intelligence, mathematics, engineering and systems analysis to develop and prove out the framework used in the study. In this interview, Vinuesa and Larosa discuss the study, the role of artificial intelligence in analyzing complex policy documents, and what these findings could mean for the future of climate action and sustainable development. How has your research shown that climate pledges are pulling richer and poorer countries onto different development paths?

Vinuesa: Our analysis of climate pledges revealed that nations are not all pursuing the same vision of a climate-friendly future. Using an AI-assisted framework, we found that high-income countries have the luxury of choosing climate investments that provide additional benefits, and lower-income countries often don't.