Profile

Timmons Roberts shifted from an early career in Biology to Ph.D. research in the Sociology of Comparative International Development at the Johns Hopkins University. His environmental interest came from growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, where chemical pollution was so serious as to cause the Cuyahoga river to burn and massive fish kills on Lake Erie. He is at ECI as a James Martin fellow, on sabbatical from his position as Professor of Sociology and formerly Director of Environmental Science and Policy at the College of William and Mary, a state university in Virginia, USA.

Research Interests

Timmons Roberts’ research is has several themes, centering on global inequality and climate change. He has applied political economy theories to explain unequal suffering by poor nations of the effects of climate change, unequal responsibility for the problem, and unequal participation in treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. This research began in 1992 with research funding from the National Science Foundation. He also has published a book and several articles on environmental justice, a conceptual framework claiming that the greatest impacts of environmental problems tend to fall on minorities and the poor. He conducted research on environmental justice while teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana from 1991 to 2001.

Timmons' research at Oxford combines his previous work on understanding national patterns of carbon emissions with another major collaborative project he has been a part of on foreign assistance and the environment. The latter project is culminating in a book entitled Greening Aid? Understanding Foreign Assistance for the Environment and is based on an original dataset of 430,000 aid projects of all types allocated between 1970 and 2001. Timmons’ current project examines what role foreign aid will have in addressing climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing nations. With special funds for adaptation and huge carbon trading systems beginning to function, the role of direct assistance has been under-studied. The project at Oxford involves three stages. First, he will examine the past 30 years of aid and its impact on national levels of carbon emissions. Second, he will examine the likely impacts of the 1,600 projects specifically addressing climate change and energy efficiency. Finally, he plans case studies of a three major developing nations: China, Brazil, and India.

Recent Publications

Recent publications include a book shortly forthcoming from MIT Press entitled A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy (with Bradley Parks). A second edition of his book The Globalization and Development Reader (with Amy Hite) is also forthcoming this fall from Blackwell Publishing. An article explaining participation in environmental treaties was recently published in Global Environmental Politics. Other articles and book chapters in the last few years have discussed the globalization of environmental justice and ways of understanding the outcomes of environmental justice struggles.