Patrick (he/him) is the Research Director at the Climate & Community Institute (CCI). Prior to joining CCI he was a Lecturer in Economic Geography at Lancaster University in the UK and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky. His scholarly research focused on the creation and regulation of new financial mechanisms by governments, financiers, and NGOs that try to reconcile capitalism’s environmental and economic contradictions. He has written extensively on these issues in academic journals including Science; Nature: Ecology and Evolution; and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, as well as other outlets including The Nation and The Conversation. At CCI his research focuses domestically on Green Industrial Policy, and globally on fiscal justice and reparations for climate action.
All Contributions
Just Disaster Response
The 2022 hurricane season exposes the trend of increasing extreme weather due to the climate crisis. Scientists cataloged six named storms, four hurricanes and two major …
Debt Justice for Climate Reparations
The world faces twin debt crises. On the one hand, a well-publicized financial debt crisis looms for countries across the Global South, limiting governments’ ability to …
Financialization, Debt, and Water in Africa
Water is life, but it is also big business. Over the last 20 years activists and scholars have noted an alarming rise in the financialization of …
Debt for Environment Swaps
Debt swaps aim to alleviate these pressures by offering some level of debt relief in return for commitments to devote freed up financial resources toward achieving …
Green Bonds
Green Bonds have been promoted as a financial tool for development banks and countries across the Global South to access money for climate action. But as …
Blended Finance
Blended finance has become a dominant paradigm in development and environmental finance over the last 15 years. The main idea is that scarce public resources will …
Debt as a Driver of Biodiversity Loss
For the first time, there are potential decisions by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that address the connections …
Achieving Water Justice in California
California’s water rights system is rooted in land theft and racism. It facilitates unjust and unsustainable outcomes that threaten the wellbeing, and in some cases the …
Inflation Reduction Act
After an excruciating year of negotiations and ceaseless pressure from the climate movement, Senators Manchin and Schumer came to a deal: the Inflation Reduction Act. If …
Ceasefire now, ceasefire forever: No climate justice without Palestinian freedom and self‑determination
Climate crisis in Palestine cannot be detached from the Israeli occupation. The brutal and extensively documented apartheid regime that Israel imposes and maintains over Palestinians is …
Exporting Extinction: How the International Financial System Constrains Biodiverse Futures
This major report sets out to answer the question of why governments in the Global South have routinely failed to achieve biodiversity goals and targets. Rather …
Primer: Green Industrial Strategy for Just Transitions
After forty years of neoliberal environmental and economic policy dominance, industrial policy is back at the center of agendas around the world. In the US, industrial …
