Why the head of WRI is optimistic about the climate fight

With development budgets falling around the world, people have started talking about hard choices. Before the COP30 climate conference, philanthropist Bill Gates published an essay about the tradeoffs between funding climate and funding anti-poverty work — but for Ani Dasgupta, president of World Resources Institute, it’s not either-or. “I don’t find it very helpful to pitch development versus climate,” he told Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar during a recent Devex pro briefing, “Because my own personal work is all about that you cannot do one or the other.” Dasgupta said Gates’ memo was more nuanced than much of the commentary about it would attest, but said that over time, his own view on this has shifted. “A lot of us, including me, felt if we solved poverty, everything else will fall in place,” he said. “That was the central hypothesis for all of us, that poverty was the problem, because rich countries don’t actually have all the other problems. … And I came to believe that by the time you solve all poverty, there will not be much world to save.” Dasgupta had just returned from the U.N.’s yearly climate conference, this year held in Belém, Brazil. “Just the fact that Brazil chose to do it in Belém, it’s a … statement that nature is important, the Amazon is important, you can’t talk about climate without nature,” he said. “And people said, ‘Oh, Belém is far away, I don’t know how we’re going to get there.’ That wasn’t true at all; 45,000 people were there. I’ve never seen so many Indigenous leaders in COP.” At any COP, Dasgupta said, there will be a push-and-pull between ambition and implementation. But Dasgupta said you need them both. “A lot of the COP is about ambition — How can we do more? How can we commit to more reduction of carbon?” he said. “But focus on implementation is very close to my heart.” And it was in that implementation that host country Brazil got creative, he explained, describing a process known as a “mutirão” — an Indigenous word meaning a collective action to solve a shared challenge — in which Brazil “put together all the things that are bubbling, but contentious” and demanded that parties agree on how to move forward. While Dasgupta expressed optimism about climate, he agreed that there are political and industrial headwinds still affecting the climate fight. “What is slowing us down is the politics of transition,” Dasgupta said. “Without politics, you can’t have a significant economic transition that we need, and I think that’s what we’re learning.”