Climate change, green growth, and aid allocation to poor countries
研究了在气候变化威胁与当前贫困并存下，如何分配针对贫困国家的发展援助，认为援助应主要聚焦于减贫和经济增长，仅在特定条件下才用于气候相关投资。
With serious impacts of climate change looming in a few decades, but current poverty still high in the developing world, we ask how to spend development aid earmarked for the poor. Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases carbon-dioxide emissions. So can greener growth that is more climate-resilient and less environmentally damaging deliver large-scale poverty reduction? Can aid be used for effective poverty reduction now without affecting carbon emissions substantially? We argue that there are bound to be trade-offs between emissions reductions and a greener growth on the one hand, and growth that is most effective in poverty reduction. We argue that development aid, earmarked for the poorest countries, should only selectively pay attention to climate change, and remain focused on fighting current poverty reduction, including via economic growth, not least as future resilience of these countries and their population will depend on their ability to create wealth and build up human capital now. The only use for development aid within the poorest countries for explicit climate-related investment ought to be when the investments also contribute to poverty reduction now, including for increasing resilience to current impacts of environmental shocks, or when the investments done now have serious intertemporal ‘lock-in’ problems so that they have implications also for when climate change bites by 2050. In an annex, we offer a series of concrete principles to judge development spending.