Climate Change and Poverty

Abstract:

Responding adequately to climate change requires taking seriously its effects on poor people. This chapter argues that the best candidate for broad agreement regarding how to identify dangerous climate change is the anti-poverty principle, which holds that climate change that imposes avoidable involuntary poverty is dangerous. The anti-poverty principle lends support to the mitigation aim of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. But if we take seriously the objective of avoiding dangerous climate change, the anti-poverty principle should inform adaptation policy as well. The principle can be operationalized for adaptation policy by using the pro-poor formula, which evaluates projects according to their effectiveness, the number of impoverished people protected, and the level of their deprivation. Furthermore, the right to promote sustainable development, understood as a liberty of right of states to pursue poverty eradicating human development within the context of an international climate change agreement, is an important principle of international justice for purposes of climate policy. Taking this principle of justice seriously has implications for responsibility for climate policy. States should be assigned responsibility on the basis of their capacity to take on burdens without harming their human development aspirations. In other words, the most highly human developed states should bear the most responsibility for climate policy.