Title: Climate change, poverty, and intragenerational equity: the national level

Authors: Steve Rayner, Elizabeth L. Malone

Addresses: School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, USA. Battelle Institute, Washington DC, USA

Abstract: This paper discusses seven propositions: climate change and poverty are linked by the issue of vulnerability; the hardest equity issues arise because of qualitative differences in the nature of climate change and policy impacts on the poor and those who are better off; poverty cannot be understood in terms of lack of goods or income, or even basic needs, but must rather be understood in terms of people|s ability to participate in the social discourse that shapes their lives; emerging multi-dimensional measures of poverty are much better than those based on income or needs, but may continue to underestimate sociocultural factors; eliminating poverty and developing societal resilience require building social diversity; climate change and policy impacts on the poor do not conform very well to analytic dichotomies of national and international, or intragenerational and intergenerational; in the final analysis climate protection and poverty elimination may be most effectively achieved through local-level actors and their global networks.

Keywords: climate change; poverty; equity; social diversity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGENVI.2001.000977

International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, 2001 Vol.1 No.2, pp.175-202

Published online: 18 Aug 2003 *

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