Carola's research is located at the interface of political science, development studies and human geography, centres on environmental and in particular climate change politics at all levels. Her PhD dissertation focused on the role of non-governmental actors in international climate change negotiations. Currently, Carola Klöck examines the links between adaptation to climate change and development aid, and seeks to understand how aid for climate change adaptation is distributed across developing countries, as well as to what extent aid-funded adaptation measures are effective and sustainable. In this context, she has a keen interest in small island states and conducted exploratory fieldwork in the Comoros in 2015.
She was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp's Institute for Development Policy and Management (IOB), where she remains an associate fellow, as well as completed a fellowship at the University of Gothenburg's School of Global Studies. She obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich.