Impacts of poverty alleviation on national and global carbon emissions

Articles https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00842-z Impacts of poverty alleviation on national and global carbon emissions Benedikt Bruckner , Klaus Hubacek 1 1 ✉, Yuli Shan 1 ✉, Honglin Zhong2 and Kuishuang Feng 3 Wealth and income are disproportionately distributed among the global population. This has direct consequences on consumption patterns and consumption-based carbon footprints, resulting in carbon inequality. Due to persistent inequality, millions of people still live in poverty today. On the basis of global expenditure data, we compute country- and expenditure-specific per capita carbon footprints with unprecedented details. We show that they can reach several hundred tons of CO2 per year, while the majority of people living below poverty lines have yearly carbon footprints of less than 1 tCO2. Reaching targets under United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, lifting more than one billion people out of poverty, leads to only small relative increases in global carbon emissions of 1.6–2.1% or less. Nevertheless, carbon emissions in low- and lower-middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa can more than double as an effect of poverty alleviation. To ensure global progress on poverty alleviation without overshooting climate targets, high-emitting countries need to reduce their emissions substantially. E xtreme inequality is a major challenge of our time. While global wealth is concentrated among a few individuals1, hundreds of millions still live in extreme poverty, defined by having less than US$1.90 to spend per day2. While international extreme poverty headcounts have been declining steadily, the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic might reverse this trend by putting millions of people into poverty3. To tackle this problem, the first of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established in 2015, is to ‘end poverty in all its forms everywhere’.4 Its targets focus on eliminating extreme poverty, as well as halving poverty, defined by national poverty lines, by 2030. Furthermore, the World Bank introduced two additional poverty lines for the global scale, one at US$3.20 per day and one at US$5.50 per day (ref. 5), to address poverty in countries with higher income levels. In the same year as the SDGs were established, the global community adopted the Paris Climate Agreement and proposed to keep global temperature increase below 2.0 °C or 1.5 °C. This leaves humanity with a limited carbon budget to emit and, thus, requires sizeable reductions of yearly carbon emissions. Currently, not everybody is contributing equally to these emissions. Due to the unequal distribution of wealth and income, there is an unequal distribution of consumption and, in turn, carbon footprints, which cover the carbon emissions caused by the consumption of an individual over the period of one year6. These emissions, too, reveal a picture of extreme ‘carbon inequality’7–10. Despite a decrease of carbon inequality in recent decades11,12, enormous differences between the global rich and the global poor remain. Moreover, growth of absolute CO2 emissions over the past 25 years was caused mainly by increasing carbon footprints of the top 10% (ref. 9). Hence, carbon inequality is a mirror to extreme income and wealth inequality experienced at a national and global level today. This leads to the question of whether both global challenges can be addressed at the same time. Can we lift millions of people out of poverty while controlling carbon emissions? Answering this question requires looking behind the scenes and quantifying the intricate connections between consumption and carbon emissions across the world. To highlight the importance of vastly different contributions to the climate crisis, quantifying carbon inequality is paramount. Consequently, it helps policy makers with establishing fair mitigation policies as well as a just allocation of the remaining carbon budget. Ground-breaking work based on income and expenditure data has been performed on this topic by multiple studies in the past decade7–9,11–13. Many of these studies distribute nationally aggregated data over population deciles or use highly aggregated expenditure or income groups. By contrast, this research uses outstandingly detailed global expenditure data from the World Bank Consumption Dataset (WBCD), which distinguishes among 201 different expenditure bins in 116 different countries14. Hence, we are able to provide unprecedented detail in the differences in carbon footprints around the world by computing country- and expenditure-specific carbon footprints using an environmentally extended multi-regional input–output (EEMRIO) approach. The carbon footprints include direct as well as indirect CO2 emissions from households, the government sector and investments. Previous research on the interaction of poverty alleviation and carbon emissions has been performed by ref. 15 using five different expenditure groups and two global poverty lines. However, these five highly aggregated expenditure groups made it impossible to look at country-specific and further international poverty lines. Using highly detailed data and multiple poverty alleviation and eradication scenarios allows us to improve calculations on the impact of poverty alleviation on carbon emissions considerably and include country-specific national poverty lines in the analysis. Moreover, this research is the first to compute carbon footprints of people living in poverty, according to various poverty lines, on a national and global scale. As a result, we can highlight the differences between countries and identify regions where policy action is needed to prevent large increases in carbon emissions due to poverty alleviation. Consequently, this research elucidates to what extent poverty alleviation could conflict with climate change mitigation efforts. 1 Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES), Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands. 2Institute of Blue and Green Development, Weihai Institute of Interdisciplinary Research, Shandong University, Weihai, China. 3 Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. ✉e-mail: ; Nature Sustainability | www.nature.com/natsustain Articles Nature Sustainability a Carbon footprint (tCO2) 0 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 2.50 5.00 7.50 Carbon footprint (tCO2) b 15 10.00 25.00 50.00 14.5 Region average expenditure (in thousand US$2014 PPP) 20 10 15 5.9 5 6.3 10 4.5 Global target 0.6 0 1.2 Sub−Saharan South and Africa Southeast Asia 2.3 2.4 Latin America MENAT 5 1.3 India China Russia and Central Asia Europe United States Region Fig. 1 | National and regional average carbon footprints. a, National average carbon footprints for 116 countries represented in the WBCD (grey countries are missing from the database and are not included in the (...truncated)