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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/fighting-poverty-might-make-it-harder-fight-climate-change
Do we focus on fact or fiction?Lifting people out of poverty is a noble goal, but it could make it harder to fight climate change. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that elevating the world’s poorest individuals into the middle class would significantly increase carbon emissions, requiring greater efforts to combat global warming.
To see whether the United Nations’s goal to eliminate poverty and stay within 2°C of warming could both be achieved, the researchers modeled two scenarios: one that just brought the world’s poorest out of extreme poverty, and the other raised them to a modest level of income. Then they calculated the carbon footprints for each income group before and after, based on the World Bank’s Global Consumption Database.
The study implies that climate and human development goals are not necessarily inconsistent, but “It really kind of depends on what level of poverty we’re OK with,” says Steve Davis, an earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved with the work. The bottom line, he adds: “If we’re really trying to consider getting people not just out of extreme poverty, but into the middle class, then maybe we do have more of a challenge.”