Addressing Climate Change and Eradicating Poverty by 2030

In this interview, Andrew Scott offers insights on why the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030 depends on action to address climate change. Andrew Scott is Research Fellow in the Climate and Environment programme of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). This interview has been conducted during the workshop on Climate, Development and Growth at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, 26 November 2015. The Climate Diplomacy initiative is a collaborative effort of the German Federal Foreign Office in partnership with adelphi. http://www.climate-diplomacy.org Subscribe to the newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2gV1nRq Follow adelphi on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adelphi.de Follow Climate Diplomacy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClimateDiplo “The international goal of eradicating poverty by 2030 is going to depend on actions taken to address climate change. The real challenge is not so much about reaching the goal by 2030, although recent evidence form the World Bank suggests that even before 2030 climate change could increase poverty by between 3-16 million people under optimistic assumptions. Under more pessimistic assumptions, the World Bank research suggests that the number of people in extreme poverty could increase by 100 million before 2030. So, there is potentially even a strong implication that climate change can effect whether or not the global goal of eradicating poverty can be reached, but even beyond 2030 if we do eradicate poverty there is going to be a challenge in maintaining zero poverty after 2030 because the current emissions pathway suggests that we’re headed towards a 3-5 degrees global warming and research by ODI suggests that that could put something like 700 million people into poverty after 2030 so even if we can maintain zero poverty, maintaining it depends on action to address climate change. Two that come immediately to mind are energy and agriculture, partly because these are the two sectors that have greatest relevance to addressing climate change in developing countries. Both of them are sources of high emissions. In the agriculture sector, which is a sector that will be severely affected by climate change because of the impacts on temperatures, the impacts on water resources, this means that potentially crop production for instance could be reduced by as much as 30% by 2080 as a result of climate change. However, you can take action to address both climate change and poverty reduction in the agricultural sector by using the appropriate technologies and agricultural production methods. The example of sustainable rice intensification illustrates this quite well I think. New approaches to rice cultivation that require less water and do not require the flooding of fields would reduce emissions, but they’d also increase productivity and have benefits in terms of reduced use of chemical fertilisers and reduced water consumption. So actions to address development and adaptation through agriculture can also produce climate mitigation benefits. For most developing countries the development question is the priority, so economic growth and poverty reduction are the policy priorities. And that should be the starting point of the discussion of what action to take. What is becoming increasingly clear with more evidence coming through and more research is that the kind of activities that you want to take to address poverty, increase resilience, enable economic growth are also activities that can benefit the climate from an emissions reduction point of view. So, if the starting point is development, it needs to be a development that is climate compatible and there is plenty evidence to suggest that that is perfectly possible and obviously specific actions are going to vary from place to place and geography to geography. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that there’s no real conflict between addressing climate change and addressing growth and poverty reduction.”