Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity, set to reverse the gains made in human development. Yet policy discussions are too often reduced to physical impacts and technical or economic fixes. In the process, root causes and wider development priorities are often neglected.
So how could a shift in focus help climate policies and initiatives to work for broader development and justice?
Current efforts and their limitations
Climate change is often talked about as a physical problem, but its causes and impacts are closely connected to social and political questions too.
Global efforts to address climate change are of course to be welcomed. For too long, climate change was ignored in development policies and programmes. But in many recent project-based interventions and financing commitments, climate policy is still disconnected from the wider and most fundamental development challenges.
The UK government has set out its international commitments to the Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) through the 2030 strategic framework for international climate and nature action and the UK International Climate Finance Strategy. In 2019, it announced a doubling of international climate finance (ICF) from £5.8bn to £11.6bn.
Four priority areas for funding are: clean energy; nature for climate and people; adaptation and resilience; and sustainable cities, infrastructure and transport. To make these commitments work in practice, it’s essential for them to be grounded in the context of diverse places, people and politics.
Repeating old mistakes
In the rush to address climate change, however, many of the same mistakes that have undermined development efforts are being repeated. A focus on technical solutions, without seeing the wider social context or the impacts on local livelihoods. A faith in markets as the way of changing behaviours. A top-down blueprint planning approach that excludes local people and their priorities. The quest for ‘getting to scale’ where challenges are inherently place-based. A reluctance to be informed by local and Indigenous knowledges alongside climate science. And a sense of urgency resulting in rushed, imposed solutions without understanding how longer-term, patient development can give better results.
Over many decades, development studies have highlighted the problems with the standard top-down, technology-transfer paradigm in development. So why are the same mistakes being made when addressing climate change?
Problems with current approaches
These problems stem in part from the kinds of questions and evidence that are emphasised in key decisions on climate policy.
The focus on biophysical processes and impacts of climate change, emphasises on models, scenarios and risk and impact assessments. This leads to an emphasis on global temperature targets and technical mitigation and adaptation measures. This can obscure other questions that are also important, including the underlying causes and consequences of climate change. The IPCC produces a range of reports, but it is the biophysical scenarios and global warming targets that get the attention and frame policy, rather than lived experiences and local/indigenous knowledge of those on the frontline. Artificial divides still persist across the IPCC’s three working groups – Physical Science (WGI), Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (WGII), and Mitigation (WGIII) – when in reality they should all be joined up, as climate impacts and solutions intersect on the ground.
The emphasis on a global biophysical framing also obscures the root causes of climate change and its impacts, originating in historically unequal processes. This includes fossil fuel-reliant industrial systems, or the entrenched power of capitalist and state socialist systems that build on legacies of extraction, colonialism and injustice.
We also know that consequences are felt differently by different people in different places, as vulnerabilities emerge from contexts and differences across class, gender, age, race, sexuality, ability and ethnicity. Ignoring these political dimensions means that UN Climate Change Conferences (COP) and other major summits focus disproportionately on technical-economic solutions, such as renewable energy, carbon capture, carbon markets and offset schemes. These solutions are also attracting considerable public and private financing towards ‘net zero’ targets and adaptation commitments.
Climate solutions often do not benefit the poor and marginalised, and can in some cases lead to further dispossession and injustice for those at the frontline of climate change. They may involve ‘green and blue grabbing’, for example removing land from people for energy investments. Projects financed through voluntary carbon markets and offsetting schemes may result in the upsetting of rural livelihoods, as land and resources are revalued and captured by elites. ‘Net zero’ imperatives can result in the displacing of the challenge to remote, poor and marginalised places. And calls to change lifestyles in the global North may not translate into other contexts. For example, arguing for reducing meat or milk consumption or opting for a ‘farm-free’ future makes no sense in much of the global South, where many communities depend on extensive, agro-pastoralist systems that both support local livelihoods and local biodiversity.
At worst, well-meaning efforts to address climate change in an ‘emergency’, rushed or reactive technocratic manner may undermine development, making people worse off while not addressing the climate challenge. Poorly designed projects, inappropriate technologies and the grabbing of resources can result in people becoming more vulnerable to climate change as solutions misfire. In the field of development, of course, this is not new: we must learn from this hard-earned experience and do better.
Priorities for climate change policy and financing
- Policies must be informed by understanding how climate change reveals, exposes and aggravates existing differences, inequities and injustices. Tackling underlying causes of vulnerability will ensure that people are better equipped to respond to diverse impacts of climate change.
- This means connecting to people’s realities whether in the UK, Uganda, or Tuvalu. Broad and vague terms like ‘tackling climate change’ are unlikely to be a priority for those who are struggling with everyday survival. Yet the consequences of climate change are very real, and many marginalised and poor people are already adapting to climate change as best they can through changing livelihoods. Linking climate change and development challenges is therefore essential. Climate adaptation and mitigation solutions need to build on the experiences and perspectives, not just of ‘experts’, but also of those at the sharp end of climate change.
- Attention to how injustices emerge and are differentiated by class, gender and other axes of difference will help with the planning and design of climate change interventions, avoiding the failures of top-down, tech-fix solutionism. This requires a respect for local knowledges and understandings and a deliberative, participatory approach to developing solutions, so they are appropriate for local contexts and people’s needs.
- A focus on transformation of wider social, political and economic systems, is essential. This requires a political lens, rather than one that’s only focused on technical or economic transitions. Climate change thus becomes central to a transformative approach to development, not separated off from development efforts. This requires a greater integration, connecting research, planning and financing.
Further reading
- Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice IDS Bulletin vol 53(4)
- Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies (open access book)
- Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance? (World Development)
- The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India (open access book)
- The Politics of Green Transformations (open access book)
- Report: Are livestock always bad for the planet?
