Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 303 | Shaping | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 303 | June 30 – July 6, 2023.

How misfiring environmentalism risks harming the world’s poor

The trade-off between development and climate change is impossible to avoid

The Economist | June 29, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Thank goodness for the enthusiasts and the obsessives. If everyone always took a balanced view of everything, nothing would ever get done. But when campaigners’ worldview seeps into the staid apparatus of policymaking and global forums, bad decisions tend to follow. That, unfortunately, is especially true in the world of climate change.

One example is the effect of global warming on the world’s poorest people. As the planet heats up, extreme events such as droughts, floods and storms are becoming more common and more severe. Many places are becoming less habitable. Over the coming decades many vulnerable farmers, from Mali to the Mekong Delta, will find their crops failing more frequently. And as resources grow scarcer, more fighting will break out.  Because people are understandably troubled by the idea of climate change forcing poor farmers to leave behind their ancestral lands, an important goal of adaptation spending is to help them stay.

Yet the truth is more complex. The vast majority of displaced people will not cross international borders but move within their own country. By 2050, 50m-216m people could be on the move internally. And many will be rural folk moving to cities, where their lives are likely to become better.  This is not an argument in favour of climate change. But it suggests that one cost-effective and beneficial form of climate-adaptation spending would be helping people move, rather than preserving small farms in ever-harsher conditions.

There is another, more profound, example of the danger of climate groupthink. From the panels of Davos to the pages of newspapers, it is increasingly argued that no trade-off exists between the economic development of low- and middle-income countries and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. 

Many rich-world leaders say they can square the circle by funding green development projects which, in theory, cut emissions and boost growth at the same time. That is true to a degree. But, without adequate carbon pricing and cross-border emissions trading to encourage the private sector to invest on its own initiative, it is an enormously expensive and fiendishly complex task. The reality of limited resources worsens the trade-off.

As a result, while leaders offer bromides about sustainable growth, an epic fight for resources rages behind the scenes between those who favour development as practised in decades past and those who want the world’s foreign-aid apparatus to turn wholeheartedly towards decarbonisation. It is a battle over what is worse: a poorer today or a hotter tomorrow.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. As the planet heats up, extreme events such as droughts, floods and storms are becoming more common and more severe. Many places are becoming less habitable. Over the coming decades many vulnerable farmers, from Mali to the Mekong Delta, will find their crops failing more frequently. 
2. The vast majority of displaced people will not cross international borders but move within their own country. By 2050, 50m-216m people could be on the move internally.  And as resources grow scarcer, more fighting will break out.
3. From the panels of Davos to the pages of newspapers, it is increasingly argued that no trade-off exists between the economic development of low- and middle-income countries and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Topics:  Global Warming, Development, Poverty