It is a conundrum in face of the century’s existential threat: Climate change. Warming of the planet has resulted in a climate that is erratic and devastating, particularly for the world’s poor whose greenhouse gas emission is minuscule. Poor are the direct victims of climate change.
Further, this risk and vulnerability result in them losing the capacity to move out of poverty.
On the other hand, the reality: Economic growth, which has been instrumental in reducing poverty, is also a high greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive activity. In the usual developed country-poor country debate over the right to emissions, this aspect emerges as the most contentious one. Developing and poor countries have to grow and thus, by default, have the right to emit GHGs.
This debate can be deduced to the rich-poor population axis as well. What about poverty eradication, which will anyway lead to further GHG emissions? Will the poor be consigned to their fate as usual because we have to curb GHGs emissions? Or, more importantly, is poverty eradication at all an emission-intensive preposition?
The World Bank’s The Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report 2024 deliberates on this argument. First, on the state of poverty in the world, the report said that “global poverty reduction slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-30 set to be a lost decade”.
Currently, 8.5 per cent of the world population live in extreme poverty ($2.15 / person / day). The world is not going to meet the goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 per cent of world population by 2030. Rather, it will take “decades” to reach this goal going by the current rate of poverty reduction. In the target year of 2030, some 7.3 per cent of the global population will be in extreme poverty.
Globally, in 2021, about 60 per cent of the population was exposed to extreme events like floods, droughts, cyclones or heatwaves. In this context, climate change will further make poverty reduction a daunting task. It has the potential to keep people in a chronic poverty trap.
A majority of the world's poor are dependent on biomass-based economies: Nearly 66 per cent of global extreme poor sustains on agriculture. This makes them highly vulnerable to climatic shocks.
According to the World Bank, “Nearly one in five people are at risk of experiencing welfare losses due to an extreme weather event from which they will struggle to recover.” It means that they will endure a severe climate shock in their lifetime “they will struggle to recover from”.
Thus, poverty eradication has assumed new urgency and demands enhanced efforts. This raises the question of whether poverty eradication efforts — additional economic growth — will add on to the GHG emissions.
World Bank’s research in the latest report cites a few studies that argue that there would not be much impact. For instance, the report quotes a study: “Unsurprisingly, research suggests that additional emissions attributed to moving individuals out of extreme poverty do not counteract climate goals, as emissions of low-income households are miniscule.”
Another quoted study in the bank’s report says that eradicating extreme poverty will result in 4.7 per cent more emissions than in 2019. “This trade-off is different across countries depending on their levels of poverty and the sources of economic growth and emission levels. Yet it is clear that the foregone reduction in GHG emissions from extreme poverty eradication is minimal,” says the report.