Global efforts to beat back chronic hunger and disease afflicting more than a billion people could come to naught unless merged with the fight against climate change, according to a report released yesterday.
The choices governments and businesses make today on how to confront global warming will determine what the world looks like in 2030, warns the report, laying out four scenarios for the future.
"Without urgent action, climate change threatens to undo years of work tackling poverty in the developing world," said Stephen O'Brien, Britain's international development minister.
Entitled The Future Climate for Development, the government-backed study predicts low-income nations will be hit first and hardest by climate-related impacts no matter how major economies evolve.
The four visions elaborated in the report all seem plausible, and none are wholly wretched or rosy.
But for the planet's most vulnerable denizens, the wrong decisions now in Washington, Beijing and Brussels could spell the difference between relative prosperity and abject misery 20 years hence.
In the first scenario, some resource-rich poor nations prosper by 2030 as the world continues down the path of smoke-stack, carbon-intensive development.
But when slashing greenhouse gas emissions becomes a planetary imperative, these fragile economies suffer most.
A 2026 climate treaty calls for severe sanctions - even military intervention - for countries belching too much C02, and the UN makes finding a technical fix for rising temperatures a top priority.
African nations that followed in the West's development footsteps now demand that rich countries - including China - pay a "carbon debt". The world is teeming with climate refugees.
Another "business as usual" scenario, called "coping alone," sees the global community come unglued amid economic stagnation after a Middle East war has driven oil above $400 a barrel.
The effort to slow global warming has been abandoned and development aid has largely collapsed, leaving the poorest, resource-starved countries to fend for themselves.
Some states have merged into regional blocs, while others have disintegrated into warring factions.
Food security is a worldwide concern, and vegetarianism a global moral movement.
"The greater good" vision presents a world in which scarcity has led to state-run resource management in poor countries not just for energy, but for water, food and access to fertile soil.
When done equitably, most people are getting enough to get by.
But the cost in individual liberties is high: birth control is mandatory, identity cards monitor individual resource consumption, companies sell services to help people stay within carbon quotas.
Products boasting "ecosystem integrity" are no longer a trend but a necessity.
In Africa and Eurasia, insects have replaced meat as a key source of protein for hundreds of millions of people.
Tensions between rival resource blocs, redrawn from the post-colonial boundaries, are intense, spilling over into violent conflict.
Finally, there is the "age of opportunity," the only scenario in which low-income countries could be said to prosper.
Boosted by a 0.05 per cent levy on international financial transactions, once-poor nations have spearheaded a low-carbon revolution and leapfrogging high-carbon technologies.
Sun-drenched Africa and parts of central Asia provide 40 per cent of the world's solar energy.
Many multinationals have moved operations to low-income countries, attracted by cheap labour and low-carbon energy.