Scientific Working Group (SWG) on
Justice, Equity and Human Development (JED)
The Scientific Working Group on Justice, Equity and Human Development (SWG JED) is the IAMC’s community forum for advancing how justice, equity, and human development considerations are understood, represented, and communicated in climate mitigation scenarios. Considerations of equity and justice are central concerns for the relevance and legitimacy of the scenarios the community produces, with growing demand from policy-facing processes. The SWG plays a facilitative role, it builds shared conceptual foundations, supports transparency about the normative assumptions embedded in scenarios and scenario generation processes, and connects the IAMC with adjacent research communities.
Work Programme
Activities are organised around four pillars. These will evolve over time in consultation with the IAMC scientific steering committee.
- Pillar 1 – Conceptual foundations and landscape mapping: a living community collection of terminology on equity, justice, and fairness in modeling choices, and a systematic stocktake of current and planned community efforts.
- Pillar 2 – Transparency: assessing existing equity and justice indicators, facilitating community additions to the IAMC variable template (via the Data Protocols SWG), and exploring a normative assumptions transparency framework for voluntary uptake.
- Pillar 3 – Model advances and complementary tools: advancing representation of within-country inequality, development, decent living standards, demand-side transformations, effort-sharing principles, and ecological justice, and supporting linkages to complementary tools where global models reach their limits.
- Pillar 4 – Community building: a community of practice within the IAMC, and cross-fertilization with the social and economic sciences, humanities, Global South networks, and stakeholder groups historically underrepresented in scenario design.
How to get involved
Membership will be established through an open process, both within the IAMC community and through engagement with external experts and adjacent research communities – including the social and economic sciences, Global South modeling networks, and other science-policy networks.
In the meantime, the SWG holds virtual calls and will convene a dedicated session at the IAMC Annual Meeting. Contact the co-chairs to be added to the mailing list for the SWG and meeting invitations.
Contact
Laura Pereira: laura.pereira@wits.ac.za and israel.notwane-skosana@wits.ac.za
Mel George: georgemv@umd.edu
Setu Pelz: pelz@iiasa.ac.at
Saritha Sudaharmma Vishwanathan: sarithasv@iima.ac.in
Co-chairs
IAMC members that are interested in participating in the work of the SWG should contact the IAMC Secretariat.