This paper reviews knowledge about the impacts of climate change on eight development goal areas and argues that it is essential for climate change to be addressed in order not to compromise development efforts. It argues that climate change will have wide-ranging consequences, direct and indirect, on development and poverty reduction and affect the achievability of any future development goals. The post-2015 process is seen as an opportunity to be more ambitious and engage a much wider range of stakeholders. It has the potential to play a role in steering global efforts to eradicate poverty and to shift to sustainable, low-emission and climate-resilient development pathways.
With the 5th IPCC report confirming the reality of climate change, this paper reviews the impacts it may have on global development and eradicating poverty. It uses the lens of climate impacts on potential new development objectives, which will become the building blocks of global development action. The paper examines recent literature projecting impacts of climate change on a set of potential goal areas, determined from growing consensus about what the goals should look like and the quality of evidence.
Key Findings:
- Given that climate change is interwoven with both economic performance and sustainable development, the world can achieve much better results by taking climate change explicitly into account in the formulation of the development goals and targets.
- Poverty eradication will be difficult, if not impossible, if climate change is not tackled. The current efforts to formulate new sustainable development goals post-2015 are unlikely to succeed if climate change and shocks are not confronted in unison.
- Climate change will not only impact areas directly affected by the climate system, such as food production or the availability of water, but will also have broader impacts on issues such as gender equality and education provision.
- The impact of climate change on food could result in more people at risk of hunger in vulnerable groups and countries. With 2° to 3°C warming, between 30 and 200 million people will be at risk of hunger; with an over 3°C warming, this number rises to 250 to 550 million people, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Recommendations:
- In 2015 the world must start a journey that credibly leads to successful climate action by 2030.
- The achievement of any set of SDGs depends on the ability to adapt to climate change.
- There are different ways to integrate climate action and adaptation into the post-2015 goals and international processes, but the final result must add up to coordinated and sufficient action.