GIVING SMALL ISLANDS A BIGGER VOICE

Southampton researchers are part of a team behind a new think tank representing the interests of small islands as they face harsher, faster impacts of climate change than larger countries.

The Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI) is part of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a leading global affairs think tank.

RESI is a global advisory network, acting as an interface between academia and policymakers, particularly policymakers in small island developing states (SIDS) and in international organisations.

SIDS are small island countries in the Caribbean, the Pacific, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, first recognised as a distinct group of developing countries by the United Nations in 1992. They share sustainable development challenges such as limited resources, remoteness, susceptibility to natural disasters, and excessive dependence on international trade.

RESI’s four main areas of focus will be environmental justice, financial stability, international alliances and equitable societies. Small islands, which are at the mercy of international norms and policies, are facing unprecedented challenges due to global economic restructuring, post-pandemic recovery and accelerating climate change.

Jack Corbett, Professor of Politics, will be a co-director of RESI. Its director will be Dr Emily Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow at ODI.

It is thanks to new ways of working due to the impact of COVID-19 that RESI has come to fruition, as Jack explained: “The team from RESI is really geographically dispersed, with colleagues in the Pacific and the Caribbean. With COVID and so much of our work moving online, we have been able to create this global network in a way that would not have been possible a couple of years ago.”

Ahead of forming RESI, Jack was behind a series of initiatives that drew attention to issues faced by SIDS. These initiatives were all funded through Impact Acceleration Account funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Jack, Emily and Cristina Argudin, Postgraduate Researcher in Biological Sciences, ran an event and participated in round tables at COP26, they wrote a blog in collaboration with the Climate Ambition Support Alliance, and they produced a report about just transitions in SIDS. They also ran an event at the 2021 Festival of Social Science, including a film about the current climate finance regime’s detrimental impact on SIDS.

Find out more odi.org/en/about/our-work/ resilient-islands/