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Development is Key to Climate Change Resilience, Wheeler says in Congressional Testimony
July 27, 2009
Congress should focus U.S. foreign assistance on human and economic development to buttress vulnerable societies against the inevitable impacts of climate change, CGD senior fellow David Wheeler told members of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment at a congressional hearing last week.
In opening statements, subcommittee chairman Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa) and ranking member Donald Manzullo (R-IL) expressed grave concerns about the ramifications of climate change and reemphasized Congress’s commitment to addressing the issue. Faleomavaega described the Waxman-Markey bill (the cap-and-trade legislation recently passed by the House) as “a step in the right direction,” while Manzullo broadly condemned increasing “global pollution.”
In his testimony, Wheeler cited India as an example of a country that is already suffering from the effects of climate change through increasingly severe bouts of drought and flood. He told the legislators that rapid, sustainable development can make India—and other vulnerable societies—more resilient to climate change and help to reduce future losses.
We need to acknowledge a fundamental truth about vulnerability to dangerous climate change. Wherever and whenever it occurs, we can be sure of one thing: the most resilience will be displayed by countries that have paid serious attention to sustainable economic and human development.
Wheeler, who previously served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, added that U.S. foreign assistance programs should foster health and education services, particularly for women.
Show me a poor country that is educating and empowering women, and I’ll show you a country that is significantly more resilient than its less-progressive neighbors when bad weather strikes.
Other witnesses on the panel—Thomas Karl, Kemal Dervis, Anthony Janetos, and Redmond Clark—also stressed the imminent effects of climate change and offered their views about the drive toward global sustainability.
Dervis, a former CGD visiting fellow and vice president and director of Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, argued in his testimony that the U.S. and other high-income countries should take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid potentially catastrophic risk:
The decision to address climate change in the U.S. and the other advanced economies should be viewed as being more about preventing catastrophic risk than attempting to optimize along a ‘known’ growth path. The world’s poorest people—those who are least able to cope—are going to suffer the most and soonest from climate change’s adverse effects.
Wheeler leads CGD’s work on climate change, which seeks to inform the climate-development debate in Congress and elsewhere by identifying cost-effective policies for the promotion of low-carbon development, by using public information to reduce carbon emissions, and by tracking the integration of climate change into development assistance.
This hearing took place during my first week as CGD’s new outreach and policy assistant. I look forward to continuing to track the work of Congress, policymakers, and advocates on climate change and other global development issues.
2 Responses to “Development is Key to Climate Change Resilience, Wheeler says in Congressional Testimony”
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July 28th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
By no means am I cynical towards what Mr. Wheeler has suggested, but does anybody see the irony that India must pursue rapid economic and human development – concomitantly increasing its per-capita environmental footprint – in order to be able to weather the effects of global warming? I always fall on the side of poverty reduction, but “low carbon development” is hard enough for America to realize, let alone India, which will need a vast, new, low-cost energy infrastructure within the next 20 years to support its growth.
July 29th, 2009 at 2:50 am
No doubt, “Development is Key to Climate Change Resilience”. However, the fragile and developing countries are facing challenges to counter the damages not created by them but by the developed countries. Thus, In addition to development support to them an additional amount of share is needed to manage the miseries of the climate change created as a result of the carelessness of their developed counterparts. Thus, Climate resilient development to them mean a situation that demands double of their investment. Therefore the letter part of the effort should be compensated as a goodwill by the developed countries to make the investment more equitable and just.