In his seminal essay, Poverty and Famines, Amartya Sen makes a seemingly obvious yet deeply profound statement: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not “having” enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” He goes on to unpack concepts of democracy, entitlements, and rights as determinants of mass hunger, and addresses the place of the non-poor in a whole-of-society approach to poverty. What Sen was raising in his examination of famines 40 years ago applies to the discourse on climate change today. The question that we must contend with now is the inverse; how do we “include” the poor in our approach to a crisis that was a direct outcome of wealth and consumption?
Until recently, much of the discussion around green energy transitions rightly centered on the role and responsibility of…
Putting equality and development at the heart of a clean energy transition
