Via Owen Barder:
Suppose you had $1 million to spend on tackling climate change. How would you spend it to get the best bang for your million bucks?
…According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, climate change experts at the Center for Global Development, the answer is (drum roll): you would do much, much better to spend your money on a combination of family planning and girls’ education in developing countries.
This table, based on data in their paper, shows how many tonnes of CO2 would be abated for your $1m:
Intervention Tonnes of CO2
savedFamily planning & girls’ education combined 250,000 Family planning alone 222,222 Girls education alone 100,000 Reduce slash and burn of forests 66,667 Pasture management 50,000 Geothermal energy 50,000 Energy efficient buildings 50,000 Pastureland afforestation 40,000 Nuclear energy 40,000 Reforestation of degraded forests 40,000 Plug-in hybrid cars 33,333 Solar 33,333 Power plant biomass co-firing 28,571 Carbon Capture and Storage (new) 28,571 Carbon Capture and Storage (retrofit) 26,316
If you’re not reading Owen’s development blog, you should be.
2 Responses
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Hi Chris, I had a row with some population controllers about this just before Copenhagen, when they tried to piggybank on the interest in climate change (wow, that seems a long time ago) by offering a ‘population offset’. I think the connection is specious – among other things, over the last 30 years, the countries with fastest population growth rates have the slowest emissions growth rate, and vice versa. See http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=1521 for more
best wishes
Duncan