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Tackling extreme poverty around the world need not impede climate action

A study has revealed that eliminating extreme poverty would result in a relatively small increase in global greenhouse-gas emissions, dispelling the idea that efforts to combat climate change and poverty are incompatible.
  1. Katharine L. Ricke

    1. Katharine L. Ricke is in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.

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  2. Gordon C. McCord

    1. Gordon C. McCord is in the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.

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Among the 17 goals set out in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (see sdgs.un.org/goals), eliminating poverty tops the list, and the 13th goal — combating global climate change — puts the 2030 agenda alongside the 2015 Paris climate agreement in terms of its impact on international climate policymaking1. But how does stamping out poverty affect the bid to stop climate change? Not as much as one might think, it turns out. Writing in Nature, Wollburg et al.2 estimate that eliminating extreme poverty by 2050 would raise annual global greenhouse-gas emissions by less than 5%. And this number shrinks by a factor of ten with a climate-smart version of growth that includes improved technologies and reduced inequality.

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Nature 623, 924-925 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03627-w

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 06 December 2023: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that high-income countries pledged to reach an annual donation of $10 billion to less-wealthy nations for climate finance by 2020. In fact, the pledge was for $100 billion.

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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