We finally consider cases in which all poor countries follow the path not of historical best but historical worst performers. In these scenarios, poor countries experience rising inequality (13% increase in the Gini by 2050), increasing energy intensity of GDP (+2.1% per year), and increasing carbon intensity of energy (+2.5% per year; Extended Table 4). In these cases, emissions even for extreme poverty eradication increase substantially, to 11.3% with rising inequality and to 8.8% and 10.3% with increasing energy and carbon intensity, respectively, compared to 4.9% in the baseline scenario. We explore a wider range of scenarios and their associated emissions in the appendix, based on the different combinations of inequality, energy and carbon intensity, and other key modeling parameters.

# **Discussion**

We study the potential trade-offs between poverty eradication and limiting global warming. Our approach to this issue is to estimate the GHG emissions from the economic growth needed to eradicate extreme poverty under different inequality, energy-intensity, and carbon-intensity assumptions.

The main finding of this study is that, at the global level, the trade-off between eradicating extreme poverty and containing global warming is small, and the need to eradicate extreme poverty cannot be used as a justification for reducing the world’s climate ambitions. This result of course does not mean that there are no trade-offs between poverty alleviation and GHG emissions _for specific policies or investments or related to some budgetary constraints_ , even though recent work points toward more synergies than trade-offs _._<sup>31</sup> When poverty reduction requires increases in GHG emissions, our second conclusion is that the eradication of extreme poverty can be prioritized, since the emissions implications will always remain very limited (at least if the energy- and carbonintensities are as good as historical standards). Therefore, our results show that the challenge to align the world’s development and climate objectives is not in reconciling extreme poverty alleviation with climate objectives _but in providing middle-income standards of living while decarbonizing the world economy_ . Our analysis faces important limitations. The modeling framework is deliberately simple to allow transparently comparing the emissions associated with different growth and income distribution scenarios consistent with poverty eradication. It is designed to explore scenarios, not to provide forecasts or predictions of future economic growth or carbon emissions.

Moreover, the model draws on historical data, which by construction constrains the range of modeled pathways to what has been observed in the past and makes the results overly pessimistic by ignoring the recent progress in green technologies and solutions. Indeed, new technologies and circumstances create new possibilities for future pathways that did not exist in the past.<sup>32</sup> For instance, new evidence shows that renewable energy sources, rather than fossil fuels, present the most cost-effective way to meet growing electricity demand in many low- and middle-income countries, suggesting that the carbon content of economic growth will be much lower in the future than historically.<sup>31</sup> Particularly relevant for extreme poverty alleviation is the potential from small-scale solar mini-grid in rural areas.<sup>33</sup> Also, there is growing evidence of the potential from energy efficiency measures to generate energy savings and economic benefits, especially linked to electrification of heat (e.g., with heat pumps) and transportation (from electric bikes to electric buses).<sup>34</sup> When low-energy and low-carbon options become more competitive than alternatives, trade-offs between climate and development objectives disappear, even though higher upfront costs and investment needs can represent a major financial challenge.

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