FOREWORD People in the world’s affluent countries know a little about the massive and severe poverty that still persists in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. Most of them regard such poverty as a mild reason for charitable giving, but they typically do not recognize it as an injustice – let alone an injustice in which they are personally involved. They believe that questions of justice do not arise in this context because they do not see themselves as acting in ways that foreseeably harm the global poor or as involved with the poor in joint productive activities whose fruits are then divided among the collaborators. This common belief among the world’s affluent is mistaken. The most straightforward way of appreciating this point is afforded by a basic understanding of anthropogenic climate change. By engaging in consumption that releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, affluent populations directly contribute to global warming which is associated with substantial harms to poor and vulnerable populations: with increasingly frequent extremeweather events, for example, and with the spread of tropical diseases, desertification and rising sea levels. Poor people are much more vulnerable to these environmental threats: they tend to live in the most exposed areas, typically cannot protect themselves (by living in solid dwellings, for example) and also lack the means to cope once some threat has materialized. And poor people are not to blame for excessive pollution: the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to them are universally sustainable in the sense that, if all human beings contributed to pollution at their level, we would have no climate change problem. The consumption of the world’s affluent produces vastly more pollution. The consumption of US residents, for instance, produces over 10 times as much CO2 as the consumption of residents of India and over 50 times as much as the consumption of residents of Kenya. This excess pollution severely harms millions of people today; and it will inflict even much larger harms upon poor populations in the future. The greenhouse gases now rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere will remain there for centuries and even millennia – continuing to warm the planet even if all emissions ceased today. Excess emissions lead then not merely to continued, but to accelerating increases in the planet’s surface temperatures. Assuming that the global distribution of income and wealth will remain as dramatically uneven as it is today, we can foresee that present excess emissions will cause vastly greater harms to poor populations in the future than they are causing today. Climate change is a clear and massive impediment to the realization of social, economic and cultural human rights. For this reason, it is a central concern of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), which is an international professional association focused on helping poverty researchers and teachers enhance their positive impact on severe poverty. ASAP fulfils its mission by promoting collaboration among poverty-focused academics and effective outreach to policy makers and broader public audiences as well as by helping academics turn their expertise into impact through specific intervention projects. ASAP strongly supports efforts to reach and to inform especially the people whose consumption contributes disproportionately to climate change. They should fully understand the harms they are causing as well as the much larger harms their current activities will cause in the future. Such an understanding will lead many of them to restrain and reorient their 1