A central theme of the Forum was to address
the problem of the climate change mitigation
and development debates taking place in
separate silos. Most of the participants
were working primarily on climate change
mitigation but were clearly aware of development issues and were keen to foreground these. The key issue is the existence of actual or potential trade-offs
between mitigation and development (in this
case specifically, employment). There are
‘win-win’ areas which clearly should be
pursued and as one commentator mentioned,
policy makers should be sure to eliminate
‘lose-lose’ policies, which are inimical
to both mitigation and development. There
was also, rightly, an emphasis on the importance of specific national contexts.
For example, Brazil and South Africa, are
two countries with some important similarities in terms of their development
paths. They are both large, upper middle-
income countries, which followed import
substitution industrialization policies.
Both are resource rich and both have very uneven income distributions, although Brazil
has recently made important progress in
reducing income inequality. But from an
emission standpoint, they are very different.
