For example, improving agriculture and agroforestry could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by a hefty 277.6 gigatons between 2020 and 2050. At the same time, it could improve food security and access to water and strengthen resilience to economic shocks.
Similarly, fostering equality—specifically, rights-based, voluntary family planning and 12 years of high-quality, universal education—enables women to have more time, skills, and other resources to participate in climate solutions and to engage in productive, income-generating work, including in the green economy. Climate solutions that foster equality can advance human well-being in areas such as maternal and child health, nutrition, gender equality, and resilience. Estimates show that one outcome of fostering equality, slower population growth, could lead to a reduction of almost 70 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions at a global level between 2020 and 2050.
Climate financing needs to reflect the reality that climate change, poverty, and human well-being are interconnected by taking a systems approach and focusing on synergistic solutions. For example, support for the world’s 500 million smallholder farm families at the epicenter of poverty and climate change that makes soils, lands, trees, and water more productive could boost income and simultaneously sequester carbon.
As practitioners who work to enhance human well-being, we see a growing nexus among climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and poverty reduction. We can make much more progress by investing in climate change solutions that do double duty as strategies for improving human well-being. And donors and innovative finance structures can better meet the needs of people in countries most impacted by the climate crisis by supporting low-carbon pathways to development that also boost human well-being.
Debbie Aung Din. Christina Kwauk, and Abiba Longwe are members of the Drawdown Lift Advisory Council.