Joyeeta Gupta

• Professor at University of Amsterdam

The Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) - between G-7+ countries and South Africa (2021), Indonesia (2022), Viet Nam (2022), and Senegal (2023) - aim to expedite coal phase out, promote renewables and incentivize a just transition. Past climate finance initiatives often fell short in terms of recipient countries’ autonomy and their financin...

Water utilities provide water, sewerage and sanitation services. Yet, they have failed worldwide to provide safely managed water services to at least 2.2 billion people and safely managed sanitation services to between 3.5 and 4.4 billion. Following 70 years of experience in different modes of water services provision, this paper addresses the ques...

Extreme event attribution (EEA) studies address the question of the role of anthropogenic climate change in the occurrence of extreme weather events. However, there is an ongoing debate between science and policy actors on whether EEA can inform the Loss and Damage mechanism. Because EEA needs local observational data, it could be affected by the '...

In the Anthropocene, when human activity, including the overuse and over-pollution of water, is leading to the destabilization of the global hydrological cycle, the concept of water security represents both a threat to and opportunity for international cooperation on water issues. Hence, this paper asks: How does Water System Justice redefine the c...

CLIFF-IA is an interactive atlas with a wide range of visualisations on fossil fuel-related information. It is a product from the research project Climate Change and Fossil Fuels (CLIFF), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101020082). The pdf i...

As Indian states continue to revise and reform their water laws in response to the escalating water crises, property rights in water instruments and their effect on water governance gain importance. Based on the examination of 153 law and policy documents shortlisted to 64, it is found that (i) India has a plural governance model with provincial wa...

There is debate about whether complex problems should be addressed technocratically or whether they should be politicized. While many tend to favour technocratic decision-making and evidence based policy, for others politicization of policy problems is fundamental for significant policy change. But politicization does not always lead to problem sol...

The Paris Agreement has seen the adoption of a 1.5° to 2 °C climate target, based on the belief that climate change becomes ‘dangerous’ above this level. Since then, the scientific community and the countries most affected by global warming have reiterated that the maximum limit to be reached should be 1.5 °C. This paper goes one step further by qu...

The Anthropocene signifies the start of a no-analogue trajectory of the Earth system that is fundamentally different from the Holocene. This new trajectory is characterized by rising risks of triggering irreversible and unmanageable shifts in Earth system functioning. We urgently need a new global approach to safeguard critical Earth system regulat...

Operating within safe and just Earth system boundaries requires mobilizing key actors across scale to set targets and take actions accordingly. Robust, transparent and fair cross-scale translation methods are essential to help navigate through the multiple steps of scientifc and normative judgements in translation, with clear awareness of associate...

Safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for surface water and groundwater (blue water) have been defined for sustainable water management in the Anthropocene. Here we assessed whether minimum human needs could be met with surface water from within individual river basins alone and, where this is not possible, quantified how much groundwater wo...

Institutional investors, who control as much as $154 trillion globally, may play an important role in shaping the energy transition as major stakeholders in fossil fuel producing, distributing and consuming companies. Research on investors and fossil fuels has focused largely on the divestment movement or on shareholder engagement. However, given t...

The literature on planetary and Earth system boundaries calls on humans to live within those boundaries. Sharing such limited ecospace raises questions of justice. Global environmental assessments and scholarship are increasingly paying attention to justice issues, yet inadequately define how to share the limited ecospace. Against this background w...

(Multi)national oil and gas (O&G) companies need to drastically change their business activities to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the context of the current climate crisis. However, despite their sustainability claims, in practice O&G majors maintain the status quo. The literature scarcely covers corporate strategies by O&G compani...

The focus on inclusive development within the 2030 Agenda highlights the contradiction between an inherent ‘business-as-usual’ approach subject to a few restrictions and a radical reformation of the global system. Inclusive development is elaborated through the idea of leaving no one behind, a human rights and a justice approach. Against this backg...

The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked1–3, yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognized; consequently, they are often treated independently4,5. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, wate...

Safe and just Earth System Boundaries (ESBs) for surface and groundwater (blue water) have been defined for sustainable water management in the Anthropocene. We evaluate where minimum human needs can be met within the surface water ESB and, where this is not possible, identify how much groundwater is required. 2.6 billion people live in catchments...

The United Nations (UN) 1977 Water Conference at Mar del Plata (MDP) sought to avoid a water crisis of global dimensions by 2000 and to ensure an adequate supply of good quality water to meet socioeconomic needs. While much has been achieved, the MDP goals are not yet realised. Unsafe, or perceived to be unsafe, drinking water still affects at leas...

The United Nations (UN) 1977 Water Conference at Mar del Plata (MDP) sought to avoid a water crisis of global dimensions by 2000 and to ensure an adequate supply of good-quality water to meet socio-economic needs. While much has been achieved, the MDP goals are not yet realized. Unsafe, or perceived to be unsafe, drinking water still affects at lea...

Living within planetary limits requires attention to justice as biophysical boundaries are not inherently just. Through collaboration between natural and social scientists, the Earth Commission defines and operationalizes Earth system justice to ensure that boundaries reduce harm, increase well-being, and reflect substantive and procedural justice....

The way in which human society uses water is continuously evolving. The present challenges related to clean water availability require the development of sustainable technologies and infrastructure. Furthermore, a stronger and wider appreciation of water inequalities and injustice demand an adequate transformation of water governance at local and g...

Despite decades of increasing investment in conservation, we have not succeeded in ''bending the curve'' of biodiversity decline. Efforts to meet new targets and goals for the next three decades risk repeating this outcome due to three factors: neglect of increasing drivers of decline; unrealistic expectations and time frames of biodiversity recove...

A critical legal issue in water governance is who owns and who holds property rights in water. Hence, we address the question: How has the state of legal knowledge on private property rights in water evolved worldwide, and how are these rights embedded in the current existing legal constructions? In answering the question, this article reviews the...

This review paper is an attempt to analyze the existing literature on hydro-hegemony (HH) theory, which has emerged to explain transboundary water interactions. The literature highlights that the conventional water interaction literature inadequately deals with three important factors: (i) asymmetric power relations, (ii) varying intensities of con...

Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C requires drastically reducing fossil fuel production and use. Institutional investors who invest in fossil fuels can potentially influence the energy transition. However, few papers investigate how investors can leverage their collective resources to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. Hence, this paper...

Environmental assessments increasingly call for just transformations, yet do not offer concrete visions of what these might be. This paper conceptualizes and operationalizes Earth system justice (ESJ) through articulating just ends which minimize significant harm to humans from Earth system change while ensuring access to needed resources for all a...

Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This article reviews theoretical and empirical approaches to justice in INEA scholarship in order to identify trends and draw lessons for the interpretation and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for living within environmen...

Coastal livelihoods and marine environmental protection are key ocean governance concerns. Consequently, the international legal framework addresses these needs in a holistic manner. Maritime boundary delimitation should not be the exception. Increasingly, international courts and tribunals are being asked to incorporate a wider range of issues in...

The UN 2030 Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals towards improving access to resources and services, reducing environmental degradation and bringing down inequality. However, there is debate on the magnitude of the environmental burden that would arise from meeting the needs of the poorest, especially compared to much larger burdens fro...

In view of increasing globalization, the ongoing promotion of foreign direct investment and the lack of comparative literature on how water property rights are changing in the global South, this article asks: How have property rights in water evolved through investor-State contracts on mineral, petroleum and land issues in Africa and Asia? We analy...

Most fossil fuel resources must remain unused to comply with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Scholars and policymakers debate which approaches should be undertaken to Leave Fossil Fuels Underground (LFFU). However, existing scholarship has not yet inventoried and evaluated the array of approaches to LFFU based on their effectiveness, equity,...

As human activity threatens to make the planet unsafe for humanity and other life forms, scholars are identifying planetary targets set at a safe distance from biophysical thresholds beyond which critical Earth systems may collapse. Yet despite the profound implications that both meeting and transgressing such targets may have for human wellbeing,...

The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change implicitly requires phasing out fossil fuels; such a phase out may cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and induce widespread socio-ecological ramifications. The COVID-19 ‘pancession’ (pandemic + recession) has rattled global economies, possibly accelerating the fossil fuel phase out. This raises the ques...

The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda rests on both economic growth and Inclusive Development (ID). However, since growth is entangled with socio-ecological exploitation and appropriation, it conflicts with ID where ‘inclusive’ encompasses social, ecological and relational dimensions, and fundamentally redefines ‘development’. Using Toulmin’s arg...

This paper is written in recognition of the contributions that Maarten Bavinck has made to the field of maritime studies and for the inspiration that he has been for many. It is hard to separate Maarten’s academic and institution-building contributions from his personal qualities, particularly his interest in human relationships. Maarten’s aptitude...

Water ownership rules can be traced back thousands of years. Throughout history, communities and states have grappled with how ‘property rights’ in water can be developed in a manner that is in line with the fugitive nature of water. This chapter shows the incremental developments in governance processes in the past centuries by briefly summing up...

Through history, property rights in water have been treated differently worldwide. Given the current global trend promoting water allocation through permits, and the lack of comparative literature on how property rights are changing in the global South, this article asks: How have property rights in water evolved including through granting water us...

The COVID-19 epidemic provides yet another reason to prioritize inclusive development. Current response strategies of the global community and countries expose a low level of solidarity with poorer nations and poorer people in all nations. Against this background, this paper addresses the question: What are the development challenges that the COVID...

Global water use grows exponentially with economic development and its associated production and consumption patterns, and population growth. At the same time, while water demand is increasing, water availability is fluctuating, not least because of the impacts of climate change. Already river basins are closing, meaning there is no water left to b...

Understanding the global security environment and delivering the necessary governance responses is a central challenge of the twenty-first century. On a global scale, the central regulatory tool for such responses is public international law. But what is the state, role, and relevance of public international law in today’s complex and highly dynami...

Participatory quantitative Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) in developing countries are rare partly due to data scarcity. This paper reports on primary data collected in the city of Port Louis to complete a HIA of urban transport planning in Mauritius. We conducted a full-chain participatory HIA to assess health impacts on the basis of a transport...

With increasing recognition of the global crisis in water resources, it becomes relevant to ask whether our legal systems are capable of making serious contributions to the management of the earth's water resources? This paper examines the evolution of national water law and its key features, the co-evolution of international water law, and the new...

Many disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives, including land use planning, tend to ignore existing long-term inequalities in urban space. Furthermore, scholars working on urban disaster governance do not adequately consider how day-today DRR governing practices can (re)produce these. Hence, following a recent interest in the political dimensions...

The principle of ‘no significant harm’ as a way of addressing transboundary environmental challenges is both inadequately researched and inadequately implemented in many parts of the world. This paper addresses the questions: What is the nature of transboundary harm in the Anthropocene? Is the principle of no significant harm able to address curren...

The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change implicitly calls for leaving 80% of coal, 50% of gas and 33% of oil reserves underground. This paper studies the scarcely addressed relationship between investors like pension funds and climate policy implementation by addressing the question: what is the extent of pension fund investments in the fossil fu...

Background High rates of motorization in urban areas of Africa have adverse effects on public health. Transport-related mortality will increase as a result of inadequate transport infrastructure, air pollution and sedentary lifestyles. Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) have proven to be a successful tool to predict and mitigate negative health impac...

Background: Conducting health impact assessments (HIAs) is a growing practice in various organizations and countries, yet scholarly interest in HIAs has primarily focused on the synergies between exposure and health outcomes. This limits our understanding of what factors influence HIAs and the uptake of their outcomes. This paper presents a framew...

This paper designs and tests a model for count outcomes to analyse the effective demand for organic vegetables in the city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. From a ‘short value chain’ perspective, we show that the distance travelled by consumers to organic vegetable production sites primarily managed by women farmers’ associations, is a key determinant...

This overview of a few of the dominant approaches to water resources management throughout history highlights society’s constant struggle with harnessing the potential of water resources while mitigating its associated risks and challenges. Management approaches have had to adjust to new types of challenges, as population growth has increased water...

The sixth Global Environment Outlook argues that the planet is becoming seriously polluted, with huge consequences for the health and wellbeing of people. Legal instruments for assessing and reporting environmental impacts of projects have focused on environment impact assessments (EIAs). However, increasingly health impact assessment (HIA) is bein...

Access to water can be through public, private or community 'ownership', that is, the riparian rights that are associated with landownership, payments, contracts, markets and permits; these rights are often institutionalised in (customary) legal systems. Most countries are now revisiting such ownership rules in the light of growing water challenges...

An under-researched story is how large shareholders (e.g. Pension Funds) and investors (e.g. Export Credit Agencies) whose investments in fossil fuels may amount to trillions of dollars are implementing the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and in particular leaving fossil fuels underground (LFFU). Hence, this paper addresses the question: What arg...

Researching socio-ecological justice issues in earth system governance can be operationalized through an Access (securing minimum needs) and Allocation (allocating the remaining resources, responsibilities and risks) framework. This paper synthesizes the review articles in this special issue. It concludes that (a) although international trade, inve...

The Driver–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) framework has been used by environmental agencies and others to assess environmental challenges and policy responses. However, in doing so, social justice or equity issues tend to come as an afterthought, while there is evidence that environmental challenges and policy responses are not equity (incl...

Perspective: a healthy planet for healthy people – Erratum - Volume 2 - Paul Ekins, Joyeeta Gupta

This perspective article from the co-chairs of the United Nations Environment Programme's Sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) uses the assessment of the literature in the GEO-6 to show how a healthy planet and healthy people are linked together. It argues that the health of the planet is deteriorating and that this deteriorating ecosystem heal...

The Paris Agreement’s 2 °C objective requires that more than 80% of all proven fossil fuel reserves become stranded resources, and investments in such resources may become stranded assets for industrialized and developing countries. The literature scarcely covers the implications of stranded assets and resources for ‘latecomers’ to development. Hen...

Although there is considerable research on participation, there is little that combines the relationship between access to information, participation and access to justice and how these can be combined to enhance groundwater governance. Hence, this article addresses the question: How can legal frameworks that recognize the right to participation al...

Participation has been increasingly prioritized in environmental policy processes to achieve inclusiveness in development. The vast literature discusses the pros and cons of participation but does not provide much information on the actual costs and value of participation. Hence, this review paper addresses the question: what does the literature te...

p>The social sciences have engaged since the late 1980s in international collaborative programmes to study questions of sustainability and global change. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the largest long-standing social-science network in this field: the Earth System Governance Project. Originating as a core project of the former Interna...

Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) motivate effective measures for safeguarding public health. There is consensus that HIAs in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are lacking, but no study systematically focuses on those that have been successfully conducted across all regions of the world, nor do they highlight factors that may enable or hinder...

Policymakers are embracing the circular economy (CE) as a means of harmonizing environmental and economic interactions, including at the urban level. Whilst numerous studies cover CE practices, few papers cover how it is being implemented and how cities (hotspots of material consumption, waste generation and disconnected pollution) are transitionin...

The sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), focusing on the theme “healthy planet, healthy people”, aims to help policymakers and all of society achieve the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals, internationally agreed environmental goals and the multilateral environmental agreements. It does so by assessing recent scientif...

Institutional analysis is used to assess macro (in)formal policy approaches while livelihoods analyses takes a micro bottom up approach to analyse how livelihoods can be improved. The two approaches are rarely linked and scarcely applied to the understudied problem of drought. Hence this paper addresses the question: How can the livelihoods approac...

Policy makers are embracing the circular economy as a means of harmonizing environmental and economic interactions, including at the urban level. Whilst there are numerous studies of circular economy practices, little has been written on how it is being implemented and how e.g. cities (significant hotspots of material consumption, waste generation...

Poorly designed policies jeopardise ecosystems and their services and the expansion of basic services to vulnerable populations. In the water and sanitation (WatSan) sector, inadequate access of the urban poor to formal and public drinking water supply and sanitation services (WSS) calls for more inclusive policies. Inclusive development (ID) has s...

The chapter argues that Development Studies is being redefined in the context of the Anthropocene and the global Sustainable Development Goals in terms of inclusive development. Anthropocene scholarship requires Development Studies scholars to look at ecological issues, take a glocal approach, and go beyond North–South binaries in order to address...

At the Climate Change Conference in Montréal in 2005, the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change decided to start a dialogue to exchange experiences and analyse strategic approaches for long-term cooperative action to address climate change.1 The Parties did not have to start their dialogue from scratch. In the last few years, policy...

Situate within new institutionalism literature, this paper builds a complex system model of institutional analysis for adaptive governance. This model combines Young's institutional environmental analysis method (2005), elements of subsequent environmental governance projects models, and ideas of multiple institutional levels and drivers. By applyi...

SDGs and IPCC Cities offer an unprecedented opportunity for a transformative urban agenda. This also requires bold, integrated action to address constraints imposed by economic, cultural, and political dynamics. In our commentary, we move beyond a narrow, techno-centric view and identify five key knowledge pathways needed to catalyze urban transfor...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for universal access to water and sanitation services by 2030 in Goal 6. This SDG Goal adheres to an inclusive development framework, focusing on social, ecological and relational inclusiveness. This overarching paper assesses the degree to which practices in water services provision are in line with th...

This conceptual paper brings together two previously disparate strands of scholarship on climate change and development together with emerging studies of stranded assets. It addresses the question: What are the lessons learnt from this literature for the way developing countries should 'develop' in a post-Paris Agreement world? The paper argues tha...

The Anthropocene is an era in which humans have become the primary driver of planetary systems, not least the global hydrological cycle. This is posing significant challenges for managing the globe’s water resources, and is catalyzing a shift in the focus of water law, governance and policy research. One important feature of this shift is a burgeon...