Climate Change and Development – serie

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 book is the first stocktaking of what the decarbonization of the world economy means for fossil fuel–dependent countries. These countries are the most exposed to the impacts of global climate policies and, at the same time, are often unprepared to manage them. They depend on the export of oil, gas, or coal; the use of carbon-intensive infrastructure (for example, refineries, petrochemicals, and coal power plants); or both. Fossil fuel–dependent countries face financial, fiscal, and macro-structural risks from the transition of the global economy away from carbon-intensive fuels and the value chains based on them. This book focuses on managing these transition risks and harnessing related opportunities. Diversification and Cooperation in a Decarbonizing World identifies multiple strategies that fossil fuel–dependent countries can pursue to navigate the turbulent waters of a low-carbon transition. The policy and investment choices to be made in the next decade will determine these countries' degree of exposure and overall resilience. Abandoning their comfort zones and developing completely new skills and capabilities in a time frame consistent with the Paris Agreement on climate change is a daunting challenge and requires long-term revenue visibility and consistent policy leadership. This book proposes a constructive framework for climate strategies for fossil fuel–dependent countries based on new approaches to diversification and international climate cooperation. Climate policy leaders share responsibility for creating room for all countries to contribute to the goals of the Paris Agreement, taking into account the specific vulnerabilities and opportunities each country faces.

This report identifies current policy trends that are helping countries decarbonize their economies whilst achieving their overall development objectives and their strategic ambition to transition to greener, more resilient, and inclusive development pathways.