Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty

Authors/Editors:Stephane Hallegatte, Mook Bangalore, Laura Bonzanigo, Marianne Fay, Tamaro Kane, Ulf Narloch, Julie Rozenberg, David Treguer and Adrien Vogt-Schilb

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

Read more: http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/978-1-4648-0673-5

Four Charts That Illustrate The Extent Of World Poverty

By Kelsey Nowakowski, National Geographic

  

The share of people living in poverty around the world has dropped in the past three decades, but over a quarter of the world’s population still doesn’t earn enough to have reliable access to food. And a billion people are extremely poor, earning less than $1.25 a day.

That’s according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2015 State of Food and Agriculture report. The report finds marked improvements in some areas—including parts of Asia, where urbanization and economic growth have been significant in recent decades. But it also shows that poverty persists across the developing world, and sub-Saharan Africa, where almost half the population is extremely poor, continues to struggle.

 The report also stresses the need to develop assistance programs for the poor that improve agricultural productivity.

These programs are especially important in places where accidents, deaths, or shifts in business can bring havoc to personal finances, and where, according to the report, “The poor become trapped in vicious circles of hunger, poor nutrition, ill health, low productivity, and poverty.”

 

Link:  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151014-datapoints-four-charts-illustrate-extent-world-poverty/

Defragmenting African Natural Resources Management & Responsive Forest Resources Governance

Africa Regional Meeting of the  International Association  for the Study of the Commons (IASC) has placed a call for papers for a Policy Forum  from the 9-11 April 2013 at Protae Hotel, Sea Point, Cape Town. The broader theme for the forum  is:

Defragmenting African Natural Resources Management & Responsive Forest Resources Governance. Suggested themes for the forum are;

- Defragmenting African resources management
- Institutional Choice and Recognition in African Forest Governance
- Embracing and harnessing local indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in natural resources management
- Effective knowledge translation for defragmenting natural resource management in Africa
- The effect of fragmented management and the additional stressors such as HIV/AIDS and climate change.  
- Implications of urbanisation and commercialisation for management of the African commons.

Submission of Abstracts deadline is: 4^th February, 2013 to lmagole@ori.ub.bw & fmatose@gmail.com

It is hosted by The Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape

For more information read more at :http://www.plaas.org.za/event/policy-forum-defragmenting-african-natural-resources-management-responsive-forest-resources

PROMOTING PRO-POOR GROWTH POLICY STATEMENT

Guidelines on Poverty Reduction show that poverty has multiple and interlinked causes and dimensions: economic, human, political, sociocultural, protective/security. The 2001 DAC policy statement focuses on one dimension of that bigger picture – reducing economic poverty through pro-poor growth. In doing so, it looks at the relationship between the economic and other dimensions of poverty and how policies for pro-poor growth and other policy areas need to interact so that, collectively, they can make major and sustainable inroads into poverty reduction.

When implementing the policy guidance on how donors can support and facilitate pro-poor growth, they must bear in mind that the poor are not a homogenous group, that country contexts vary considerably, and that policy implementation must be based on a sound understanding of who the poor are and how they earn their livelihoods. Promoting pro-poor growth requires policy choices.

The article is available at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/povertyreduction/44244087.pdf