A Glimpse into Climate Inequalities with Lucas Chancel

At Sciences Po, the Master in Ecological Transition, Risks and Governance is designed to train a new generation of professionals who can understand, navigate, and lead the ecological transition. As part of the program, a series of core courses is being designed to provide students with a strong interdisciplinary foundation. 

To offer a first insight into this curriculum, we asked Lucas Chancel, Associate Professor at CRIS and co-director of the World Inequality Lab, to present us his core course “Political Economy of Climate Change and the Environmental Transition”.

Bringing together insights from economics, political science, and environmental studies, Lucas Chancel’s course will address one of the central challenges of the ecological transition: the relationship between climate change and inequality. Rather than treating these issues separately, it aims to emphazise their deep interconnections—highlighting how patterns of wealth and income distribution shape both responsibility for emissions and vulnerability to their impacts.

The course is designed to provide students with a structured understanding of these dynamics at both global and local levels. It introduces key empirical findings on the unequal distribution of carbon emissions, while also examining the political and institutional conditions under which climate policies can be made both effective and socially just. By combining analytical tools with policy-oriented thinking, this teaching aims to prepare students to contribute to the design of equitable climate strategies.