Institute of Development Studies

Are Western Values Driving Climate Change?

30 November 2009

Leading poverty and environment groups have joined Nobel Prize winners and other international experts to call for a new economic model to support the new climate deal being negotiated in Copenhagen this December. The call comes in a new report Other Worlds are Possible - Human Progress in an Age of Climate Change, from The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, of which IDS is a member.

The report calls for new economic approaches that are more in tune with people and the planet. It is the sixth to be published by the group alerting the world to huge threat from global warming to human progress and includes radical economic proposals from leading economists based in developing countries that are already beginning to bear the human and economic costs of climate change.

‘The global financial and global climate crises provide an important space for reassessing the basis of the development model around the world,' said Tom Tanner, IDS Research Fellow and member of the Climate Change and Development Centre. ‘Other Worlds are Possible provides a timely contribution to the agenda for changing the development paradigm to one that prioritises human welfare, social justice and environmental sustainability.'

The report describes how the costs and benefits of global economic growth have been very unfairly distributed, with those on lowest incomes getting the fewest benefits and paying the highest costs. A wide range of examples of more positive approaches are given which paint a picture of more qualitative development that is not dependent on further global over-consumption by the already rich, in the hope that crumbs of poverty alleviation are perhaps passed to those at the bottom of the income pile.

Other Worlds are Possible? proposes that there are more choices about our collective economic future than many policy makers and regulators claim. It calls for action to embrace new thinking on how to run economies. There is a pressing challenge to design a new model for human progress and development that is climate-proof and climate friendly, with shared access to natural resources.

The report notes that the difference between success and failure in the international climate negotiations will be whether governments and financial institutions continue to support old, failed economic approaches or whether they will move to encourage and replicate new approaches that take account of our changed economic and environmental circumstances.