Environment

Least developed countries lead on low-carbon resilience

Vehicles emit greenhouse  gases that contribute to global warming
Vehicles emit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming

As the world waited for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to release its latest report last month, climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern emphasised that: “It cannot be a case of either achieving growth or tackling global warming. It must be both.”

In rejecting a trade-off between addressing climate change and securing growth and development, Stern supports a low-carbon resilient development approach, which brings together three traditionally separate goals: the reduction of climate change emissions (climate change mitigation), adaptation to the effects caused by climate change and economic and social development.

This approach has been pioneered by nine of the least developed countries (LDCs)—Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Laos, Mozambique, Nepal and Rwanda—over the past four years. These ‘early adopters’ offer important insights into how low-carbon resilient development works in practice, providing lessons for other countries that may develop such strategies in the future.

The assumption that drives low-carbon resilient development is that addressing two or three policy areas together can produce successes across the three agendas and be more cost-effective.

However, efficiency is just part of the approach’s appeal. The LDCs value low-carbon resilient development for many other socio-economic and political reasons, including the way they can use it as a moral weight in encouraging developed nations to curb their own emissions. It bolsters the approach of the LDC group at the international level to move from following other countries to asking other countries to follow them.

Countries have treated low-carbon strategies and resilience in different ways. For example, in Bangladesh, they are separate policy areas; in Ethiopia and Rwanda they have been brought into one overarching policy framework.

It is not yet clear, however, how these different approaches affect the extent to which governments can meet goals to develop, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to climate change.

Related Articles

Back to top button