Pathways out of the Polycrisis

• To maximize impact on poverty reduction, growth must be inclusive by creating job opportunities while ensuring that those living in poverty can take advantage of these opportunities (for example, through quality education).
• Promoting economic growth, basic investments, and insurance is fundamental to sustainably improve lives. Those actions reduce multidimensional poverty and enhance resilience against extreme weather and other shocks.

Without action, many lower-middle-income countries will surpass higher-income peers in absolute levels of emissions. 

• Accelerating economic growth, enhancing the productive capacity of poorer households, and managing risks are key.
• Scaling up synergistic policies that can contribute to all goals is critical—e.g., tackling local environmental hazards such as air pollution can provide multiple gains.

• Potential transition costs associated with climate mitigation must be managed—particularly for people living in poverty and for the most vulnerable.
• Upper-middle-income countries also have a significant share of the population facing climate risks, and it is in their own population’s interest to accelerate the transition process to protect them from future hazards.

• Across the board, more reliable, granular, and timely information is needed to address these complex policy issues.
• More investment is needed to strengthen national statistical systems and to design innovative approaches to advance data and modeling for welfare analysis.
• Data should be made public to better monitor policy impacts and facilitate policy design.
• Data efforts should also invest in understanding other dimensions of well-being, such as deprivation in access to services, health, or food security.

Potential policy pathways often differ drastically depending on a country’s historical development trajectory, access to technology and financing, and national priorities.

• Countries must prioritize actions that will have the highest returns for development, which means changing how they approach their national development strategies and their contribution to global public goods.
• Ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet will require novel ways of organizing economic activity.

The COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the global economic slowdown have exacerbated the already high debt levels in poorer countries. 

• Closing financing gaps for sustainable development is critical to enable the transition toward more sustainable, low-carbon, and resilient economies.
• Lower-income countries will need substantial and immediate investment in both adaptation and mitigation actions.
• International development cooperation needs to play a larger and more effective role, and there is a pressing need for more and better alignment of funding.