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

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.