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SDG: 10 Reduced inequalities

Reduced inequalities

This Sprint investigates a critical and under-recognised consequence of climate change: the increased risk of childhood sexual abuse during and after climate emergencies across Eastern and Southern Africa. Led by Professor Lucie Cluver (University of Oxford, Department of Social Policy & Intervention), with co-leads Associate Professor Neil Hart (School of Geography & the Environment) and Associate Professor Seth Flaxman (Computer Science), the project brings together an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, climate scientists, and data scientists.

Working in collaboration with the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, the International Federation of the Red Cross, World Vision International and the University of Cape Town, the Sprint will provide urgently needed evidence on how drought and extreme heat affect risks of sexual violence against children and adolescents.

The team will combine climate and child protection data, using advanced computational methods, to generate new insights for real world policy impact. The team is committed to working with policy partners to co-produce accessible materials designed for direct use by humanitarian agencies and governments across Africa.

Why this Sprint? Why now?

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, extreme heat and recurrent drought are becoming more frequent. These conditions are associated with increased poverty, food insecurity, caregiver loss, and school closures – all known risk factors for violence against children. Already, one in five girls in the region experience sexual violence before age 18, with lifelong health, educational, and economic consequences. Yet there is almost no quantitative research examining the linkages between climate emergencies and child sexual abuse. This leaves governments and international agencies without the knowledge and tools required to prevent avoidable harm.

The Sprint addresses this evidence gap at a critical moment, as the climate crisis escalates and humanitarian actors seek new ways to anticipate and reduce its impacts. By generating clear, actionable evidence in collaboration with international partners, the project aims to ensure that climate resilience efforts centre the need to protect children from sexual violence. Meaningful impact will ensure we can contribute to a safer, more just, and more sustainable future.

In 2026, the UK government will decide on its Seventh Carbon Budget, covering the years 2038 to 2042. Policies recommended by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) require widespread social change, additional investment of around 1% of GDP, and major changes in practices and technologies within many industries (CCC, 2025). To successfully navigate such major changes, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) have identified macroeconomic and distributional analysis as evidence gaps they must address to set the Seventh Carbon Budget. In this Sprint we aim todevelop new modelling approaches to fill those evidence gaps. The models will assess macroeconomic impacts of carbon budgets, including the impact on people with different levels of income and wealth. Methods will be designed so as to be readily transferrable to other countries and regions.

Data-driven macroeconomic agent-based models have the characteristics required to model carbon budgets’ macroeconomic and inequality impacts. These models use real socioeconomic survey data to simulate the interactions of households, firms, government and the financial sector. This realism allows very specific policy interventions, in contrast to most macroeconomic climate modelling that flattens all policies into a carbon tax equivalent. This class of model is in its infancy but has already demonstrated the potential to rival the forecasting performance of DSGE* models (Poledna et al., 2023). Our team at INET Oxford has developed a prototype model that covers all OECD countries (Wiese et al., 2024). As the model outputs individual income and wealth balance sheets for each of the thousands or millions of agents represented in each time period, it has great potential to conduct dynamic analyses of the distributional impacts of policy over time.

* Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models

Why this Sprint? Why now?

Partnering directly with DESNZ, we aim to provide provisional analysis in time to influence the 2026 Seventh Carbon Budget. This will enable macroeconomic and inequality goals to be taken into account when the government decides how emissions reductions are allocated between sectors of the economy, and how individual mitigation policies in the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (DESNZ, 2023) are implemented.