Tackling poverty need not impede climate action

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. On page 982, 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. The authors analysedarichdataset3 containing the income distributions of 168 countries, drawn from household surveys that were compiled by the World Bank, with which Wollburg and colleagues are affiliated. They looked at the relationships between income and consumption, and estimated future changes to a country's economy on the basis of information about its past and that of other countries. The authors then extrapolated past trends to calculate the amount of economic growth needed to reduce extreme poverty levels in all countries to 3%, the threshold below which the World Bank considers extreme poverty eliminated. The authors conducted similar analyses of the relationships between income and energy use, as well as energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions, to estimate how much this economic growth would increase the atmospheric concentrations of gases linked to global warming.