Read pretty much anything on the links between climate change and development and you'll soon stumble across a statement along the lines of 'poor people are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change'.

It's hard to refute this. People living in poverty simply don't have the resources to cope with a changing climate, especially when they have to cope with so many other stresses.

For me, the problem is that the condition of "poverty" and its link with climate change is being used by some people in power to forward their own political and economic agendas.

A common line is that more economic growth - based on a very narrow definition of development - is the solution to both poverty and climate change.

But is it the state of being poor that makes people vulnerable to climate change, or the processes that lead to their impoverishment?

For example, economic 'development' often forces communities off their land to make way for big infrastructure projects like dams. They may be resettled in less fertile areas, reducing their earning potential and their ability to cope with extra stresses like heavy rains or droughts.

Poverty is defined in various ways but usually it's the 'one dollar a day' or 'two dollar a day' benchmark. If you take the latter, then according to World Bank figures for 2006, 45 percent of the world's population (2.8 billion people) lives in poverty.

This is a pretty appalling situation. But I would argue that, if you have access to a clean and healthy environment that provides for your needs - meaning you don't need two dollars a day (or perhaps even one) - then you aren't living in poverty!

For some groups in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, who still have access to land and fresh water and live on considerably less than a dollar a day, lack of hard cash isn't an indication of vulnerability.

What puts them at risk from climate change is the fact that, in many cases, their lands are being destroyed by oil and mining companies.

In a world where economic development is seen as the pinnacle of human achievement, it's heresy to suggest that poverty should be re-defined away from a financial benchmark. Yet it needs to be if we are to truly understand the links between poverty and climate change.

ECO-COLONIALISM?

The poverty-vulnerability linkage makes me think about Australia and the current situation faced by Aboriginal Australians.

For 40,000 years, Aboriginal Australians have managed to sustain a truly unique, thriving and rich culture on one of the most inhospitable continents on Earth. Aboriginal people have experienced extremes in weather and climate, and have adapted successfully to these changes.

Just over 200 years ago, the continent was invaded by the British and, since then, most Aboriginal people have been assimilated into a culture that is alien to them and has forced many into conditions of poverty.

Those people who were, in the past, some of the most adaptive people to changes in climate now rank among the most vulnerable. The wonders of development, indeed!

Is it not the process of assimilation into 'white' culture and the forced disconnection from their land that has made Aboriginal people vulnerable to climate change rather than their poverty?

This is an extremely important question to ask in a world where most of those who are poor and face the biggest threat from climate change are descended from people who had indigenous adaptation strategies to climatic and other environmental hazards which would - if they hadn't been colonised - have made them far less vulnerable than the 'rich' to the impacts of climate change.

I believe the reason why those in power don't want the rich to see themselves as vulnerable to climate change is because they're the ones who should be doing something to mitigate the problem.

The global economy depends on the rich doing what they do - consuming and boosting economies - so the illusion has to be created that economic growth reduces vulnerability to climate change.

But as I've argued here, in many cases, it has the opposite effect because it destroys cultural and bio-diversity and environmental 'services', which are the very factors that underpin adaptive capacity.

For wealthy countries to maintain the international economic pecking order, it's important that people living in poverty are made to feel dependent on their rich benefactors who can not only pull them out of poverty but also make them less vulnerable to a threat over which they have no control - climate change.

The people who caused the problem retain their power and dominance because they're the only ones who can solve the problem! To me, this amounts to eco-colonialism because, whichever way you look at, people living in poverty always remain dependent and subordinate.

But it could backfire. If some of the worst-case climate change scenarios do come to pass, then the rich are also going to be extremely vulnerable and, if push comes to shove, I'd prefer to have knowledge of my land and how to grow food in inhospitable environments than the keys to a Bentley!

This may be a trite statement but we need to grasp that it isn't only poor people who are threatened by climate change, and it is this realisation that may finally spark concerted action. Sometimes self-interest is the only way.

Sadly - and dangerously - the very wisdom that could help make us all less vulnerable to climate change is being lost as more and more people are sucked into a global economy that values only certain types of knowledge and beliefs.

That's why it's so important we re-think the Western development paradigm and what this is going to look like in a warmer world. Thankfully, many aid workers and academics from both the global South and North are starting to take up this challenge. Let's hope they're not too late...

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