Despite international efforts, poverty has become more widespread in many countries in the last decade, making poverty reduction the core challenge for development in the 21st century. In the Millennium Declaration, 189 nations have resolved to halve extreme poverty by 2015 and all agencies involved in this paper are committed to contribute to this aim. However, climate change is a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts. Currently over one billion people, two-thirds of them women, live in extreme poverty on less than one dollar a day.
This figure rises to 2.8 billion if the standard of two dollars a day is used. Climate change will compound existing poverty. Its adverse effects will be most striking in the developing countries like Pakistan because of their geographical and climatic conditions, their high dependence on natural resources, and their limited capacity to adapt to a changing climate. Within these countries, the poorest, who have the least resources and the least capacity to adapt, are the most vulnerable. Projected changes in the incidence, frequency, intensity, and duration of climate extremes including heat waves, heavy precipitation, and drought as well as more gradual changes in the average climate, will notably threaten their livelihoods. This would further increase inequities between the developing and developed worlds. Climate change is, therefore, a serious threat to poverty eradication. However, current development strategies tend to overlook climate change risks.
An approach that uses both mitigation and adaptation is needed. Current commitments to mitigate climate change by limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will not, even if implemented, stabilise the atmospheric concentrations of these gases. Developing adaptive capacity to minimise the damage to livelihoods from climate change is a necessary strategy to complement climate change mitigation efforts.
All those responses to climatic conditions that reduce vulnerability are, therefore, an integral and urgent part of overall poverty reduction strategies. Adaptation should not be approached as a separate activity, isolated from other environmental and socioeconomic concerns that also impact on the development opportunities of the poor. A comprehensive approach is needed that takes into account potential synergistic and antagonistic effects between local and global environmental changes as well as socioeconomic factors.
Today, it is widely agreed by the scientific community that climate change is already a reality. The rate and duration of warming observed during the 20th century are unprecedented in the past thousand years. Increases in maximum temperatures, numbers of hot days, and the heat index have been observed over nearly all lands during the second half of the 20th century. Collective evidence suggests that the observed warming over the past 50 years can be mostly attributed to human activities. The warming trend in the global average surface temperature is expected to continue, with increases projected to be in the range of 1.4 to 5.8 ºC by 2100 in comparison to 1990.
Even though climate change is a global threat, it is also very much a problem for development, since poorer countries, having the least adaptive capacity and hence the most vulnerable populations, are expected to suffer the greatest adverse effects. This is because many of the world’s poor are found in geographically vulnerable places, and live under vulnerable environmental, socioeconomic, institutional, and political conditions. Climate change provides an additional threat that adds to, interacts with, and can reinforce existing risks, placing additional strains on the livelihoods and coping strategies of the poor.
Strategies to strengthen capacity to cope with current climate variability and extremes and to adapt to expected future climatic conditions are mutually supportive and will have immediate benefits. They will also help identify and take advantage of the positive impacts of climate change. There is much experience to date of coping with climate variability and disasters from which useful lessons for adaptation can be drawn. Ensuring that the poor are able to adapt to current and imminent climate variability is the first step. The task ahead for the development community is to enhance the adaptive capacity of the poor and poor countries and to help to implement specific actions for addressing climate change impacts.
The writer is Executive Director Centre for Environment & Development