King Climate Action Initiative

The King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) generates evidence and catalyzes the scale-up of high-impact policy solutions at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation. By designing, testing, and scaling evidence-based policies related to climate change, K-CAI aims to improve the lives of 25 million people by 2030.

K-CAI supports new research on effective programs and policies to tackle the four greatest climate-related challenges facing our world: climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, climate change adaptation, and energy access.  It makes use of J-PAL’s great strengths. These include designing and evaluating innovations that increase opportunities and reduce burdens for people living in poverty and working with governments and other partners to scale effective solutions. K-CAI researchers collaborate with decision makers around the world to conduct rigorous randomized evaluations and scale up effective programs and policies that reduce carbon emissions to slow the pace of global warming; improve public health by reducing pollution; increase the resilience of vulnerable communities against extreme weather events; and increase access to reliable, cleaner energy.

The consequences of climate change are already being felt through heat-related mortality, worsening food security, and extreme weather events that damage and displace populations.  The world’s poor are most affected by climate change, which threatens to reverse decades of progress in global poverty alleviation. K-CAI uses J-PAL’s evidence-based problem-solving to address the impact of climate change on people living in poverty so that well-informed policies can mitigate the harm to their lives and livelihoods.

King Philanthropies’ founding support of K-CAI is helping bring forth new and creative solutions that address both climate change and poverty at scale and help tens of millions of people.