Maximizing Co-Benefits: Exploring Opportunities to Strengthen Equality and Poverty Reduction through Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract

Meeting the global commitment to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels will require collective, complementary and simultaneous action by nation states and multinational entities. This crisis, however, is additional to existing development challenges and is symptomatic of a fractured development model that has tended to emphasise the quantitative over the qualitative. The climate crisis comes amid a global economic crisis and the reverberating impacts of the preceding fuel and food crises. Multiple crises have arisen from the successive and collective failures to connect the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development appropriately, and to address systemic vulnerabilities arising from income inequality and volatility, lack of opportunities, unequal distribution of and access to resources, and a high dependence by the poor and vulnerable on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture. Thus the climate “crisis” presents a unique opportunity and added urgency to achieving the ideals expressed in Agenda 21 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) relating to sustainable and equitable development. (...)