Climate
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Wolfgang Blau, managing partner of the Brunswick Group; Lolita Jackson, Perry World House non-resident senior advisor; Stephen Hammer, CEO of the New York Climate Exchange; and Michael Weisberg, Perry World House Deputy Director discussing the outcomes of the United Nations climate conference COP28. (January 2024)
With the world increasingly close to critical warming thresholds, climate change is a defining challenge of our time, demanding urgent and transformative action.
That is why Perry World House has made addressing climate change a core focus. Toward this end, PWH’s climate-focused work has primarily been focused on the human impacts of climate change, bringing experts to campus to advance discourse and work on climate migration, security, cities, finance, small islands, heat, and health. PWH has also worked closely with the International Peace Institute to achieve negotiated outcomes at the COP, playing a central role in the decision to establish new funding arrangements to address Loss and Damage, the unavoided impacts of climate change.
PWH has established itself as the place on campus coalescing and translating diverse research into global climate policy. Guided in part by Genie Birch and Michael Weisberg, PWH will continue to have a dedicated research agenda on climate adaptation and climate finance, around which it has built a network of experts and access to decision making processes locally and globally. PWH’s comparative advantage lives in its ability to work across Penn’s many schools, centers, and disciplines, at the science-policy interface, to influencing direction setting and outcomes at the highest levels of climate diplomacy.
Borders and Boundaries Project
Do international political borders matter in the modern world, and, if so, in what ways? The Borders and Boundaries Project at Perry World House researches how political life both affects and is affected by international borders and border security policies. This interdisciplinary, multi-method effort is directed by Professor Beth Simmons and is composed of research teams studying border politics across a variety of different research areas.
Global Climate Security Atlas
Perry World House's Global Climate Security Atlas is an online climate data visualization project. Bringing over 200 geospatial climate-related datasets together into one place, the website layers these datasets over a map of the world. Users can use this map to compare physical climate projections, environmental and ecological data, and information on social and political systems.
Great Powers and Urbanization Project
Over the course of the early twenty-first century, cities have increasingly moved into the international arena, taking on a growing role in global issues. Great power politics and urbanization are not separate phenomena. Peace, power, and prosperity in the twenty-first century will require urban expertise, as will solving global problems around climate change, migration, and equitable development. The Great Powers and Urbanization Project, or GPUP, is a collaboration of global leaders in international and urban affairs: the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the University of Melbourne’s Connected Cities Lab, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the Argentine Council for International Relations (Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales).
