Julie Rozenberg – författare

This report focuses on the decarbonization aspects of green growth, looking at the planning instruments, policy mix, and financial structure that can help deliver what is needed to keep warming as close as possible to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together.

Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015." Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight ofpoor people.This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to wellbeing than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities.As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.

This report estimates the funding needs to close the service gap in water and sanitation, transportation, electricity, irrigation, and flood protection in developing countries. It finds that costs vary greatly depending on service goals and policy choices, and that low carbon trajectories do not cost most more than polluting alternatives.