Whose voices, whose choices? Pursuing climate resilient trajectories for the poor

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Highlights

  • Climate Resilient Trajectories consider aspects of climate change adaptation and mitigation in a sustainability context.

  • Specific and complex contexts in which poor and marginalized people operate need to be considered.

  • Critical to consider short- and long-term time frames when prioritizing and implementing development agendas for the poor.

  • Involvement of relevant stakeholders key to ensuring trajectories yield expected benefits.

Abstract

Climate Resilient Trajectories are routes to development progress that take into account aspects of climate change adaptation and mitigation in a sustainability context, offering a way to explicitly consider impacts of development and climate change choices on different sectors, scales, and socio-economic effects. Due to their scope and relevance, Climate Resilient Trajectories are of great interest to climate scientists, governments and the private sector, based on the urgent need to consider different strategies to decarbonize the economy. Pursuing such trajectories may also be beneficial in processes to implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) up to 2030 and beyond. This Communication describes the concept of Climate Resilient Trajectories and clarifies its relevance, with particular attention to the poor. It also outlines some of the necessary considerations to ensure no one is left behind. It highlights the need for the design of Climate Resilient Trajectories to be flexible enough to accommodate the specific and complex contexts in which poor and marginalized people operate; and that the involvement of all relevant stakeholders (e.g. governments, business and private organizations, policy makers, and whole communities) is necessary in order to ensure such trajectories yield the expected benefits. It further demonstrates that it is critical to consider both short- and long-term time frames when prioritizing and implementing development agendas for the poor.

Section snippets

The concept of climate resilient trajectories

Climate Resilient Trajectories (CRTs), defined as the ways in which choices and actions lead to increased climate resilience over time, complement the original term of Climate Resilient Pathways used in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5). Climate Resilient Pathways describe the various routes which could be followed to enhance resilience. CRTs emerged from the need to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation actions, taking into account

Areas of action: proposed CRTs for the poor

Adaptation pathways are sets of possible actions that may be implemented over time, depending on possible future economic and societal dynamics (Bosomworth and Gaillard, 2019; Fischer, 2018). Such pathways explicitly consider uncertainty and embed flexibility within planning processes. Low greenhouse gas (carbon) emission trajectories are at the heart of CRTs to harness the full potential of both sustainability and equity objectives, and to advance towards achieving the SDGs. Hedging against

Towards sustainable trajectories for transitions

CRTs demand certain prerequisites in order to yield the expected benefits. First, due consideration must be given to climate justice. A social justice approach encompasses particularism, pluralism and procedural justice (Wood et al., 2018). Procedural justice can be facilitated by recognising local people’s identities, cultures and values; and providing local people with meaningful participatory opportunities. It requires the management and challenging of power asymmetries; creating widespread

Conclusions

Improved understanding of the interactions between adaptation, mitigation and sustainable human development is needed, in order to create equitable, sustainable CRTs. This requires:

  • Research that improves climate risk characterisation and identifies network-held risks associated with climate events.

  • Better understanding of the role played by policy frameworks, especially in contexts where multiple decision-making processes do not sufficiently take into account the many interacting risks and

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Walter Leal is a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany and Head of the Research and Transfer Centre "Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management. His research interests include climate change adaptaion, biodiversity and conservation, ecology, environmental sciences, sustainability, and higher education. He is also the editor of the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

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