Enlarge / Eliminating extreme poverty won’t necessarily boost emissions as much as people fear. (credit: Soltan Frédéric )
The United Nations’ first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) aims to eradicate poverty around the world. If implemented, however , it might see people consume more—drive more often, buy more products—and, thus, produce more carbon emissions, fueling climate change. “With more money to spend, and therefore more consumption, there is usually a higher carbon footprint, ” Benedikt Bruckner, a master’s student of energy and environmental sciences at the University of Groningen, told Ars.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, according in order to a new study put out by Bruckner, other researchers away of Groningen, and colleagues in the United States and China.
Published in Nature, the research makes use of high-level data about consumption patterns to show that reaching SDG 1—which shoots to move every person out of extreme poverty (under $1. 90 per day) and half of everyone above the poverty lines of their respective countries—won’t excessively fuel climate change.
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