Human-Induced Climate Change, Poverty Scenario, and the Future Pathways: Risk and Responses in the Global South

The transformation from a mutual human-nature relationship into a collective view of humans on natural resources as the ‘fuel’ for ‘development’ catalyzes the ‘unsustainability’ with the firing of the very first furnace during the Industrial Revolution, and it took more than two decades to set the goals for development triggering ‘sustainability.’ Similarly, it took a couple of decades to diminish different ‘myths’ and ‘taboos’ to establish the scientific consensus on climate change that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are the primary cause of this phenomenon. While continuing emissions increase the likelihood and severity of global effects, like most other hazards in the human habitat world, they also carry the threat disproportionately higher to the people experiencing poverty. Their economic limit to spend for adaptation makes them depend on government aid to survive. The Global South states are mostly economically weaker developing countries, and many share a common history of past colonialism under Northern states. While these states, on the one hand, need the energy for their economy to take off, significantly fewer people’s access to green technology makes this ‘taking off’ highly correlating with greenhouse gas emissions. Although the last decade has shown a remarkable decline in the number of extremely poor in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the effects of climate change have every possibility to change this scenario to a worse direction if the adoption strategies through government initiatives take careful attention to the people at the most rear part of the economy who are most vulnerable to re-enter the poverty trap.