viewpoint

Climate change is a development issue, and only

sustainable development can confront the challenge
MARTIN PARRY*
IPCC 2007 Assessment of Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Centre for Environmental Policy and Grantham Institute, Imperial
College, London SW7 2A, UK

In this first issue of Climate and Development, it

is worth reminding ourselves of five broad
lessons learned in the past few years, during
and since the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment
(IPCC, 2007). These lessons, taken together, lead
to the conclusion that climate change is a development issue. In essence, this conclusion has
two parts:

and 2 illustrate this in their summaries of projected impacts. Not only is there a very high correlation between impact and poverty, but efforts
to reduce poverty are likely to be diminished by
climate change. The IPCC concluded, for
example, that climate change could impede
achievement of Millennium Development Goals
(Yohe et al., 2007).

Unsustainable development, in the past and

the present, is the root cause of climate
change.
B Sustainable development is certainly a necessary, and probably a sufficient, condition for
overcoming this challenge. Simply adding
on mitigative and adaptive strategies to
unsustainable development will not work.

2. Mitigation alone will not avoid serious

impacts on development

1. Climate change poses a particular threat to

those marginalized from development
It has been clear since the Second Assessment of
the IPCC (IPCC, 1995) that people and places
where development has been slow are most at
risk from climate change. But the Fourth Assessment (IPCC, 2007) emphasized the very high projected impacts on those marginalized from
opportunity, especially the poor, elderly and the
young (and women in many societies). Figures 1

It is now clear that current mitigation targets,

even if fully achieved, would not avoid major
global impacts. For example, probably the
best the UNFCCC can achieve is agreement
towards a 50 per cent cut of current global
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However,
Figure 1 shows that this target allows an even
chance of, for example, a billion additional
people being short of water due to climate
change, as well as many other serious global
damages. Additionally, the uncertainty range in
Figure 1 indicates a substantial risk of much
larger impacts occurring. To reduce serious
global damage, we need to adopt much more
stringent targets at least an 80 per cent cut in
global emissions, as shown in Figure 2 (Parry
et al., 2008). Even then, the global effects are
likely to be severe.

B *E-mail: martin@mlparry.com
CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT 1 (2009) 59
doi:10.3763/cdev.2009.0012 # 2009 Earthscan ISSN: 1756-5529 (print), 1756-5537 (online) www.earthscanjournals.com

6 Parry

FIGURE 1 Selected global impacts projected for varying amounts of climate change (from IPCC WGII Technical Summary, 2007),
with shaded column indicating likely impact outcome in 2100 for a rate of greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 50% of current
levels by 2050 (continued at constant rate to 2100) (modied from Parry et al., 2008)

3. The demands on adaptation will be very

large
Because there are limits to damage avoidance by
mitigation, the challenge for adaptation will be
truly enormous. Figures 1 and 2 show this
extent (the area left of the shaded mitigation
columns being the field where impacts can only

CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT

be avoided by adaptation). This adaptation

field is, however, almost certainly a substantial
underestimate because Figures 1 and 2 assume
global emissions to have peaked by 2015, something barely possible even in an ideal world. It is
likely that the adaptation field shown on the
figures will have to expand rightwards to allow
for mitigation that turns out to be slower and

Climate change is a development issue 7

FIGURE 2 Selected regional impacts projected for varying amounts of climate change (from IPCC WGII Technical Summary,
2007), with shaded column indicating likely impact outcome in 2100 for a rate of greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 80%
of current levels by 2050 (continued at constant rate to 2100) (modied from Parry et al., 2008)

CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT

8 Parry

less stringent than the ideal. This is one of many

interrelationships between mitigation and adaptation that need further examination (Klein
et al., 2007).

4. Future vulnerability will depend more on

development pathways than on climate
change
While current development status may well affect
the risk of damage from climate change, alternative future development may have an even
greater effect. Of course, development experts
have guessed this for some time. But climate
impact assessments now support this assumption. These have used various future social and
economic scenarios (IPCC, 2000) to examine
what the climate change impacts might be
under differing development pathways. Their
overall conclusion is that more of the difference in
projected impact is due to future development than
to climate change. To illustrate, Figure 3 shows estimates of the number of people globally projected
to be at risk of flooding in 2080. These numbers
are much greater under the A2 scenario (high
population, low income per capita and many
poor people) than under the A1FI (high population and high income) or the B1 and B2
futures (global and regional governance, both

with sustainable development) (Nicholls et al.,

2007). Even assuming no climate change and no
sea-level rise, there is a striking difference
between the impacts because more poor (and
therefore exposed) people are assumed to be
living in flood-prone areas in east and southeast
Asia in the A2 future than in the other futures.
Unfortunately, the A2 development pathway is
the nearest to business-as-usual development.

5. Sustainable development is both a

necessary and a sufcient condition for
confronting climate change
The previous example indicates that, with the
right kind of development, we can develop our
way out of the climate change crisis. But that
will require a radical change in type of development. Trying simply to add on to our current
development pathway the large mitigation and
adaptation tasks which face us would make confronting climate change immensely costly,
which may partly explain why we have not yet
been successful in agreeing a way forward. For
example, protecting billions of poor people
against impacts would, when all the costs are
added up, be far more costly than raising people
from poverty. A change in paradigm of development appears to be necessary one of sustainable
development.

6. Conclusion

FIGURE 3 Estimated millions of people per annum at risk

globally in the 2080s from coastal ooding. Light bars are
numbers at risk without sea-level rise. Dark bars are numbers at risk with sea-level rise (IPCC WGII Technical Summary, 2007)

CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT

Traditionally we have acknowledged only two

policies to confront climate change: mitigation
and adaptation. But now there is a strong indication that, taken alone, these would not work
because they are simply patching up a flawed
development system. Much more likely to be successful is a strategy of sustainable development
that combines mitigation and adaptation in a
whole package of other development strategies,
including high levels of efficiency and equity in
resource use, investment, governance and
income growth.

Climate change is a development issue 9

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