UC Berkeley

Our awareness of detrimental changes to all environmental systems has forced us to project into the uncertain future to determine how to live in the present. The United Nations (UN) is currently holding the global conversation on climate change by incorporating ‘sustainability’ in poverty reduction goals. After decades of scientists failing to work with other core disciplines to mobilize our society, those outside of the discipline have started to write about the inevitability of societal collapse to express urgency in a way that connects with popular culture (Bendell, 2018). This is a process tracing case study to understand the development trajectories captured in public datasets of the Republic of Cuba since the Special Period began. During this time, the island nation was able to avoid a major collapse and begin to shift towards a circular economy, a central tenet of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). A noted weakness of public global development data is the lack of intranational resolution. While satellite imagery has limitations, it can give insight into regional conditions. Assuming unique milieus have produced varying change to the Cuban landscapes across regions, this research attempts to capture that variance using global public datasets. Measuring intranational variance is a key part of the UN’s development goals that necessitates data at local scales. The lack of consistently produced global datasets severely constrain the ability to use them for time series analysis or local level adaptation planning. Cuba’s ability to educate its citizens makes it possible to examine the role of human capital accumulation on ‘sustainable’ regional economic adaptation and poverty reduction. The political climate of the country also helps us discuss the balance needed between strong governance and individual freedoms as the nation underwent a multisector decentralization effort.