SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series: Professor Thomas Tanner and Professor Ulrich Volz

Lecture 1: The Real Adaptation Gap: Development in a Climate Changing World Given ongoing failures to prevent the causes of global heating, tacking climate-related impacts is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. This lecture critically examines our dominant approaches to adapting human society to climate change and looks to interdisciplinarity and decolonising knowledge as reasons for optimism. Lecture 2: Reversing the Vicious Circle of Debt, Underdevelopment, and Environmental Change This lecture examines how climate vulnerability and nature loss create a vicious circle in which developing countries face higher sovereign risk, rising capital costs, and decreasing fiscal space for investment. It subsequently discusses ways of enhancing investment in resilience and sustainable development to reverse this process and create a virtuous circle.