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Climate Change
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Climate change and development are closely intertwined. Poor people in developing countries will feel the impacts first and worst (and already are) because of vulnerable geography and lesser ability to cope with damage from severe weather and rising sea levels. In short, climate change will be awful for everyone but catastrophic for the poor.
Preventing dangerous climate change is critical for promoting global development. And saving tropical forests is essential to doing both. Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch's new book, Why Forests? Why Now?, illustrates how today—more than ever—saving forests is more feasible, affordable, and urgent.
- Jonah Busch: High Marks for the Paris Climate Agreement; Let Countries Trade Carbon
- Frances Seymour: Forests in the Paris Agreement — Plus Prizes, Protests, and All-Male Panels; Royal Jelly and “GNUs”: Postcards from the Paris Climate Summit
- Michele de Nevers: Financing for Adaptation to Climate Change: Ensuring the Most Vulnerable Are Covered
- Look to the Forests: How Performance Payments Can Slow Climate Change (report)
Historically, the responsibility for climate change, though, rested with the rich countries that emitted greenhouse gases unimpeded from the Industrial Revolution on — and become rich by doing so. Now, some of the most quickly developing countries have become major emitter themselves just as all countries are compelled by the common good to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A major challenge of reaching a global deal on climate change was to find a way for poor countries to continue developing under the planetary carbon limits that rich countries have already pushed too far. That will involve scaling up finance to deploy clean technologies, to adapt to the effects of climate change, and to compensate countries that provide the global public good of reducing emissions, especially by reducing tropical deforestation.
CGD’s research and policy engagement on climate and development has had two aims: to strengthen the intellectual foundation for a viable international accord to come out of the COP 21 in Paris and to provide data, research, and analysis that policymakers and others can act upon even in the absence of an international agreement.
Highlights
Graphics: Climate Change and Development in Three Charts
Initiative: Tropical Forests for Climate and Development
Book: Greenprint: A New Approach to Cooperation on Climate Change
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From 2004-2013, Brazil reduced climate emissions by more than any other country on earth, thanks to its success cutting Amazon deforestation by 80 percent. Now, a new study in Ecological Economics finds that actions to protect the Amazon were affordable too, costing Brazilian governments at the federal, state, and local levels just $2.1 billion over nine years—one-third the estimated $6.2 billion price tag of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Given the global climate benefits those trees will provide, shouldn't the tree-planters earn more than just recognition? Shouldn’t they earn some performance-based payments too?
In the short run, the uncertainty about future national policy may discourage private investment in renewable energy and other low carbon technologies. At the same time, the freedom to forge its own climate policy and to step out ahead of the EU may open opportunities for more ambitious action and creative intellectual leadership in UK support to developing countries.
It’s been three weeks since the UK voted to leave the European Union in the move popularly known as Brexit, and the consequences are still becoming apparent. Senior fellow and director of CGD Europe Owen Barder joins the podcast from London this week to take a balanced look at possibilities for the UK’s future, and consider implications for the country and the developing world.
A showpiece “clean coal” project in Kemper Country, Mississippi is three years behind schedule, four billion dollars over budget, faces swirling allegations of contracting scandals and shoddy construction, and has yet to capture or store any carbon. Safe, cheap, natural carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) is already available at large-scale—in the form of forests.
After meeting in Paris, the Carbon Fund has provisionally approved the first two REDD+ programs in DRC and Costa Rica. After eight years writing a charter, negotiating a rulebook, and vetting proposals, it was long overdue. Learn about the Carbon Fund approval process in this post.
Reducing fossil fuel emissions to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less means that a huge amount of proven fossil fuel reserves will need to stay in the ground. A new Oxfam America Research Backgrounder by Professor Simon Caney of Oxford rightly proposes that, in considering which assets will be “stranded” (left in the ground), priority for extracting these fossil fuels should somehow be given to the poorest countries/people. But while poor countries should get priority when it comes to selling fossil fuels, when it comes to using them, they should be viewed as an energy source of last resort, after alternatives have been seriously explored.
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