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By Rodrigo Santos Andrade
Universities should follow communities’ lead on climate research
visibility comment0 event November 15, 2026 timer 11:00
Climate change has been accelerated, in large part, by technologies developed at universities.
Delegates from around the world are currently gathering in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31. Among the issues up for discussion will be an important question: who should pay for the harms caused by climate change?
One study estimated that between 1850 and 2015, the Global North was responsible for 92 per cent of the carbon dioxide emissions that exceeded countries’ fair shares of a safe global limit.
The United Nations Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, established at the 2022 COP in Egypt, has received requests from 119 countries seeking US$2.8 billion in funding, far more than the US$342 million allocated to its start-up phase. Canada committed CA$16 million, while the United States, the largest historical emitter, pledged US$17.5 million, then withdrew from the fund’s board in 2025.
Decisions on the first regular round of funding requests are expected in December 2026, but Nigeria’s environment minister expressed the frustration of many when he said in June that the fund “looks like a mirage.”
Behind the struggle over loss and damage is a question that extends beyond climate finance. What responsibilities do institutions that benefited from carbon-intensive development bear toward those living with the consequences, especially when some losses cannot be undone?
Universities have their own climate debt to confront. “Climate change and planetary destruction have been accelerated, in large part, by technologies developed in universities,” as one of us, Mateus Tremembé, has written.
Universities and climate change
Universities have helped build and sustain the carbon-intensive economy in several ways. They have produced much of the knowledge it runs on, from petroleum engineering to economic models that treat continuous growth as a measure of progress.
They have trained professionals who design, manage and finance that economy, often reinforcing the idea that land and nature are resources to be extracted. And many have maintained financial ties with fossil-fuel companies through research partnerships, donations and investments.
Research can also reproduce extractive relationships, even in projects meant to help communities adapt to climate change. Local and Indigenous communities often contribute significant knowledge, labour and data, while academic researchers frequently retain control over the questions, funding, data and interpretation, and recognition flows disproportionately to universities.
This imbalance runs counter to the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and article 31 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirm Indigenous Peoples’ authority over their knowledge and data.
Addressing these patterns requires a reparative approach to climate research: one built on long-term accountability to communities and their lands, redistributing resources and authority, and treating Indigenous and local knowledge as expertise rather than raw material.
Research cannot undo irreversible losses. But where communities invite collaboration, it can support their efforts to respond to ecological change on their own terms.
Importance of shared authority
The distinction between providing resources and sharing authority is also central to debates over climate finance. The loss and damage fund describes its approach as “bottom-up, country-led and country-owned”, with provisions for local engagement. This is meant to counter the longstanding tendency for climate finance priorities to be set by international institutions and donors.
But country ownership is not the same as community control. In many countries, governments have long made decisions about Indigenous lands and lives without Indigenous consent. Requiring national government endorsement does not guarantee that Indigenous Peoples will decide how losses in their territories are defined or addressed.
This matters especially because many climate losses cannot be fully measured in money. They may involve broken relationships with rivers, plants and animals, cultural practices tied to place, or knowledge passed between generations. When governments and funders define losses only in monetary terms, these dimensions can disappear from view, along with communities’ own priorities for responding to them.
Community-directed research
Adaptation seeks to reduce climate risks. Loss and damage concerns harms that cannot be fully prevented or reversed. Both raise questions about who defines harm, what should be sustained or repaired and who directs the response.
These questions inform our work on community-directed adaptation research, or C-DAR. The premise is simple but demanding: communities should lead in setting research questions and making decisions, with as much control over resources as possible.
In Ceará, northeastern Brazil, the Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú Indigenous people are facing environmental pressures that affect their way of life, with climate change expected to bring more severe droughts and extreme rainfall.
The community is developing collaborative research initiatives to strengthen traditional food systems, including collective farming, environmental education for young people and phasing out the use of pesticides.
The Tremembé people have also drawn up their Territorial and Environmental Management Plan, a document that sets out community priorities for the management of natural resources and for maintaining traditional knowledge and practices.
More than just a planning document, it represents a collective commitment to present and future generations: that children born in the territory will have access to drinking water, clean rivers, healthy fish, living forests and ancestral knowledge that is practised and passed on.
For the Tremembé, protecting biodiversity also means ensuring the continuity of life, culture and relationships with their land. Repair involves sustaining the knowledge, practices and territorial conditions that communities identify as necessary for their collective futures.
Following communities’ lead
Under a community-directed adaptation approach, communities decide what data are collected, how they are used and who controls them. Academic research partners can support these efforts by following the community’s lead and contributing their skills when invited.
In Tremembé territories, academic partners have supported the installation of weather stations to record rainfall and temperature, and young people are involved in assessing water security.
The aim is to bring these data into conversation with Elders’ knowledge of how springs and rivers have changed and to inform climate adaptation planning.
Ultimately, the value of such research should not be measured only by whether it contributes to academic knowledge, but by whether it strengthens a community’s ability to monitor ecological change, make adaptation decisions and sustain knowledge and relationships across generations.
Communities are already responding to climate change, drawing on generational knowledge and relationships with their territories. Universities can contribute expertise, resources and infrastructure, but doing so requires following communities’ priorities and rethinking established research practices.
As climate finance begins to tackle loss and damage, universities should begin confronting their own climate debt by shifting control over research priorities and resources toward communities.
Evan Bowness receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program.Sharon Stein receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Mateus Tremembé does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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