15 July 2014

This is why I don't care about climate change

Well, not "don't care at all", but, you know, not as much as about poverty and development. Stefan Dercon puts it better than I ever have:
Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases CO2 emissions. So can greener growth that is more climate-resilient and less environmentally damaging deliver large scale poverty reduction? ... We argue that there are bound to be trade-offs between emissions reductions and a greener growth on the one hand, and growth that is most effective in poverty reduction. We argue that development aid, earmarked for the poorest countries, should only selectively pay attention to climate change, and remain focused on fighting current poverty reduction, including via economic growth, not least as future resilience of these countries and their population will depend on their ability to create wealth and build up human capital now. The only use for development aid within the poorest countries for explicit climate-related investment ought to be when the investments also contribute to poverty reduction now

2 comments:

Sean said...

I'm not sure if framing it as the reason you don't care about climate change makes much sense. You should maybe say why you think developing countries shouldn't focus as much on climate change, that is fair. Just seems rather shortsighted to say it the other way.

rovingbandit said...

Yeah, it's a cheap headline, just trying to be provocative.

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