Nobel prize winners join top anti-poverty and environment groups in call for new economic approaches to support climate deal
Today, Monday, 30th November, leading poverty and environment groups were joined by Nobel prize winners and other international experts in calling for a new economic model to support an urgent tough, new climate deal to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December.
In a new report from The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, supported since its formation by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), leading international development economists and major international agencies call for new economic approaches more in tune with people and the planet. The report Other Worlds are Possible - Human Progress in an Age of Climate Change; is the sixth to be published by the group alerting the world to huge threat from global warming to human progress.
With forewords from Dr Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, and the world leading environmental economist Prof Herman Daly, Other Worlds are Possible includes radical economic proposals from leading economists based in developing countries that are already beginning to bear the human and economic costs of climate change. Theirs are the points of view often overlooked by commentators in rich countries. Contributors include
- Prof. Jayati Ghosh (India):
Prof Ghosh rejects for India the economic development model represented by rich countries like the US, and argues that without new, less materialistic role models for human development, in a carbon constrained world, poorer countries are being set up to fail.
- Prof. Wangari Maathai (Kenya):
Nobel prize winning Prof. Wangari Maathai argues that for Africa to tackle climate change and to leap-frog dirty development, significant new financial resources will be needed, along with appropriate technology transfer. But she also calls for radically new democratic approaches to decision making.
- Prof. Manfred Max-Neef (Chile):
Prof. Manfred Max-Neef lays out a comprehensive new economic development model that addresses environmental limits and dismisses the idea of relying on economic growth to tackle poverty. He says the shape of future economic development is one of far greater regionalisation and localisation of markets.
- David Woodward (Cambodia):
David Woodward describes the outline of what could become a global ‘green new deal.’ He offers a clear outline of a new, flexible development model is that can both eradicate poverty and address climate change and resource scarcity.
The report describes how the costs and benefits of global economic growth have been very unfairly distributed, with those on lowest incomes getting the fewest benefits and paying the highest costs. A wide range of examples of more positive approaches are given from the wide, practical experience of the agencies in the coalition. Altogether they paint a picture of more qualitative development that is not dependent on further global over-consumption by the already rich, in the hope that crumbs of poverty alleviation are perhaps passed to those at the bottom of the income pile.
Other Worlds are Possible? confirms that better ways to organise our economies, communities and livelihoods already surround us, and posits that there are more choices about our collective economic future than many policy makers and regulators claim. The challenge is now clear, and many of the solutions well known. The task now is to act and embrace new thinking on how to run economies.
This report demonstrates that there is no shortage of new ideas to choose from. However, the pressing challenge of designing a new model for human progress and development that is climate-proof and climate friendly, with shared access to natural resources, remains neglected. Conventional definitions of development have been largely set by industrialised countries to favour their own economic interests and often imposed on poorer societies, regardless of place or cultural context.
Other Worlds are Possible notes that difference between success and failure in the international climate negotiations will be whether governments and financial institutions continue to support old, failed economic approaches, with their policy frameworks and our financial resources, or whether they will move to encourage and replicate new approaches that take account of our changed economic and environmental circumstances. This timely report makes the case in compelling terms that there is not one model of economic development; there are many.