Climate Change, Development, Poverty and Economics

Abstract

The Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both agreed in 2015, provide a new basis for international cooperation and development. In the two agreements, there is now a common platform for the next phase of the fight against poverty. The SDGs make it clear that environmental protection will be a key feature of this next phase and increasingly intertwined with poverty reduction.

At the core of this is climate change. Climate change is a threat of a completely different magnitude and character from those of the past. To continue our progress in the face of climate risks we need both strong policy action and a radical deepening of economic analysis. We need to construct theories and models that reflect the unique challenges we now face and the contexts in which they arise.

This paper sets out the challenges for policy and economic analysis that arise form climate change.