Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Android

“The poorest people in the world contribute exactly nothing to climate change,” says Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo. For decades, she has worked to tackle the so-called “wicked problem” of poverty. In this conversation with Climate Curious co-host Ben Hurst, Esther connects the dots between poverty and climate change. Esther shares how she’s removing the capital “P” in poverty, instead focussing on actionable and effective solutions for adapting to changing environments, through her work with the Poverty Action Lab. Recorded live at TED Countdown 2025.

Join the Climate Curious conversation on socials:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/climatecuriouspod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@climatecuriouspod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtF6xzNkVIczlDmVcH8FCMA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10996041/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TEDxLondon
Website: https://tedxlondon.com/podcast/
All other links: https://linktr.ee/climatecuriouspod

Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston

00:00 Introduction
00:56 Meet Esther Duflo: tackling global poverty
02:18 The impact of climate change on the poor
06:21 Innovative solutions for climate resilience
07:02 Agricultural adaptation in Niger
10:02 Conclusion

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of Climate Goodness. From our TEDxLondon experts in under 10 minutes in this week’s climate, curious, we are blessed with a Nobel Prize winning [00:00:15] economist who spent her entire career working on the wicked problem of poverty. Esther Duflo fresh off the stage from her talk at TED Countdown in Nairobi this summer.

[00:00:25] Maryam Pasha: We hear about how climate change impacts those that contribute to the problem the [00:00:30] least, and what she’s been doing with her organization, J-PAL, the Poverty Action Lab to help find workable solutions to help build climate resilience. Also, check out the full length conversation on YouTube now where Esther expands on the [00:00:45] projected economic impacts.

[00:00:46] Maryam Pasha: Of climate change on how she’s trying to take the capital p out of poverty. Here’s Esther Duflo. Stay curious.

[00:00:56] Meet Esther Duflo: tackling global poverty

[00:00:56] Esther Duflo: I’ve been working on, on poverty, and by poverty [00:01:00] I mean global poverty, the, the, the life of the very poorest people in the world for my entire career. And my work has really been focused about transforming this wicked problem, as you say, into a zillions, tractable [00:01:15] issues, which is really what it is, but we usually don’t like to see it this way.

[00:01:18] Esther Duflo: And once we remove kind of the big capital P of poverty. Instead, we think about, oh, how, what do we do to get kids into school? Or what do we do to make [00:01:30] sure they’re learning something when they’re in school? Or how to improve immunization rates or how to improve, uh, the take up of, uh, technology in agriculture in Africa.

[00:01:39] Esther Duflo: All of this problem one by one, by one by one. Can be treated very much in the [00:01:45] way that you are thinking about treating disease, which is thinking about a specific treatment, which would mean intervention in the poverty space. See whether. It works by using randomized controlled trials like you would [00:02:00] test a medicine and if it doesn’t work, then move to the next thing.

[00:02:04] Esther Duflo: Most things don’t work. It’s good to know, but if it does work, then you can scale it up. And that is the work that we are doing, uh, at j the, the poverty action at the [00:02:15] institution that I have funded and I still, uh, co-direct to them.

[00:02:18] The impact of climate change on the poor

[00:02:18] Esther Duflo: For the longest time, I’ve really focused on any number of problems on poverty, uh, including the environment, but not so much climate change because, uh, the poor people in the world contribute exactly nothing to climate change.

[00:02:29] Esther Duflo: [00:02:30] Just to give you an idea, an African in the bottom half of the distribution of income in Africa. Emits 122 less time, uh, greenhouse gas than an American in the top 10% of the distribution. [00:02:45] So this inequality in emission is such that it’s kind of never really in my shoe think, okay, there are more important things to deal with right now about, you know, immunizing kids and HIV and whatnot.

[00:02:58] Esther Duflo: But a few years ago I realized [00:03:00] that, and. Before that, let me say this approach has had tremendous amount of success. Um, maybe 20 years ago, we were seen as, uh, not jobs by wanting to, you know, do experiments. On poverty issues, but the [00:03:15] approach has really, uh, caught up. Uh, governments across this continent and also in India and Latin America are now using it to improve the effectiveness of their programs and policies.

[00:03:26] Esther Duflo: And what eight, 800 million people have already [00:03:30] been touched by the program that, uh, we have shown to be effective. Someone in our network of researchers have shown to be effective. So this was all going swimmingly, and there have been a lot of progress. Not just to due to us, but there have been a lot of progress on the key problems that the [00:03:45] poor face, maternal mortality has been divided into since the 1990s.

[00:03:50] Esther Duflo: Infant mortality has been divided by two. The death from HIB have plummeted. Uh, the death from malaria has plummeted. Most kids are in school and so [00:04:00] on. So everything was going well, but what we are facing in the next. 10, 20, 30 years is the prospect that some of these gains would be erased, uh, by climate change because the world’s poor live [00:04:15] in the hottest places.

[00:04:17] Esther Duflo: And if the earth warms up, let’s say two degrees, it doesn’t quite warm up the same way everywhere. But we could first approximation it does. But if you go from, you know, a 30 [00:04:30] degree Celsius day to a 32, it is very, very, very, very different than you go from 18 to 20. When you go from 80 to 20, you know, you’re from comfortable to comfortable.

[00:04:39] Esther Duflo: So there’ll be more and more places that are inhabitable. There have been more and more people who [00:04:45] live, you know, day in, day out, in super hot circumstances, all in the poor countries. Whereas in Denmark, they’re going to have, you know, cooler, they’re going to have warmer winter, which is going to save a lot of lives.

[00:04:57] Esther Duflo: So for the broadly speaking for the [00:05:00] north in term of mortality is not a bad thing. Okay? There are a lot of other damages they shouldn’t ignore, but from. For the, for, for the, the poor countries and poor people. It’s a disaster. The other reason why it’s a disaster is that poverty itself hinder adaptation.[00:05:15]

[00:05:15] Esther Duflo: ’cause people don’t have electricity because they work outside, uh, because they have homes that are not, you know, that are small and not well ventilated and so on. So, uh, income is externally protective. If it’s very hot in Texas, you can’t crop the air conditioning. It’s very hot in [00:05:30] Pakistan while you still go to go to your construction war.

[00:05:32] Esther Duflo: Yesterday, I, uh, I took a car, went out of, uh, you know, about two hours of, um, Nairobi, near Masai in a place that gets very hot in the, in the summer. And I ask people, what do you do when it gets very [00:05:45] hot? Uh, I asked a bunch of women who were hooking vegetables on market. And they’re like, nothing. What do, what do you want us to do?

[00:05:51] Esther Duflo: And I was like, isn’t it tiring? I was like, yeah, of course it’s tiring. Our legs get, you know, flabby and our heartbeats fast, but where is the money going [00:06:00] to come from? So that’s, that’s the issue. So at this point I decided, okay, if I’m looking, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ahead, I have to find a way to make people aware.

[00:06:14] Esther Duflo: [00:06:15] That poor people are in the world are the prime victims of climate change, and we have to do something to deal with it. So.

[00:06:21] Innovative solutions for climate resilience

[00:06:21] Esther Duflo: Uh, in Poverty Action Lab, we have a, an a climate initiative called kk, the King Climate Action Initiative, which has, which focuses on the, uh, different pillars of climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and uh, energy access.

[00:06:37] Esther Duflo: So mitigation are things like, what, what can you do to reduce emissions? Adaptation is how can you find solutions to help people [00:06:45] adapt? And energy access is because people in the developing world. Badly need access to energy in a way that is not, um, contributing to the problem. So let me focus, give you an example of, so, and all we do is this randomized control trials plus [00:07:00] helping governments scale up what we have found to be effective.

[00:07:02] Agricultural adaptation in Niger

[00:07:02] Esther Duflo: So let me give you an, an example concrete example for adaptation, um, which. So Niger is a extremely arid place where a lot of the soil is [00:07:15] so badly degraded that it’s very difficult to grow anything there. Exist a technology, uh, which is called in French Damil, like a half moon. Where what basically you do is to, um, dig in the soil, uh, shape hole [00:07:30] in the shape of the half moon, large enough and deep enough that, uh, the water from the rain whenever it comes, kind of stays there.

[00:07:37] Esther Duflo: And luckily it kind of doesn’t make a pond, but it, it retains moisture. It makes the pond very temporarily [00:07:45] maybe, but then the pond goes away, but it soaks in. So that technology has been shown by agonist to be effective. Uh, what, uh, our e economists did. So this is work by Kelsey Jack and her collaborators, uh, Jenny Ker and others.

[00:07:59] Esther Duflo: What they have done [00:08:00] is, uh, uh, set up an our city working with, uh, farmers to, uh, train them to use this to, to dig this holes. And they were interested in, oh, do we need to train them? Do we need to give them a financial [00:08:15] institution incentive to do it, or do we need both? So they worked across, uh, hundreds of villages and set up different treatments where, uh, in, in a randomized way.

[00:08:26] Esther Duflo: So literally flipping coins. So some villages got just [00:08:30] a training, some villages got the money, some villages got the training and the money. And some villages are the control group. So very much the way you would test them. A vaccine where some people get a vaccine, some people get a placebo. So here these are the four for treatment and a control group.

[00:08:44] Esther Duflo: And then they looked what [00:08:45] happens? And what I found is that it is basically sufficient to tell people how to do it. For them to adopt it, at least to a, to some extent, money is not necessary because I guess people see the value of doing it and they, they don’t need money. They [00:09:00] just need time, uh, and effort and they want to do it.

[00:09:02] Esther Duflo: Uh, so that’s the first great news because that’s much, much cheaper than, you know, going around distributing money to do it. And the second good news is that when you follow over time, uh, the, uh, product productivity [00:09:15] of the land really skyrockets from zero to something that’s much higher than zero. And it also makes it, it’s also adaptative in the sense that it’s, it makes the, the production more drought resistance.

[00:09:27] Esther Duflo: So not only you increase the level, but you reduce [00:09:30] the fluctuation. So that’s kind of, that was their study. They published their study and then they started working with the government to try and get a scale up of this, uh, of the adaptation of this technology. So this met with all sorts of geo [00:09:45] geopolitical issues because there was a co Niger and then, uh, U-S-A-I-D, uh, uh, vanished in a puff of smoke recently.

[00:09:53] Esther Duflo: But despite that, you know, this is going on and, uh, and progressively there is, uh. Scale up of this method, [00:10:00] which could really, you know, help farmer and Niger a lot.

[00:10:02] Conclusion

[00:10:02] Maryam Pasha: Thanks for listening to this quickie.

[00:10:04] Esther Duflo: This episode was

[00:10:05] Maryam Pasha: created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon. Until next time, stay [00:10:15] curious.