Small Farmers, Big Impacts

While the development commu­ nity has recently begun the turn toward climate-sensitive program­ ming, climate-related efforts have focused on big transformations and big polluters. Energy generation and deforestation are easily identified sources of greenhouse gas emissions for which we have data and policy tools, and therefore a certain degree of comfort. Certainly, global emissions are greatly influenced by energy generation, distress­ing rates of deforestation in what remains of the world's tropical forests, and other large sources of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the future of development's work at the intersection of climate change and human well-being lies not in an exclusive focus on big drivers of change, but in a broader engagement that includes a focus on the ways in which the livelihoods decisions of the rural poor might exacerbate or ameliorate the green­ house gas emissions that shape climate change. The convergence of two fallacies have led to a lack of focus on the individual and community decisions that affect climate-related development efforts: a fallacy of stationarity, enabled by our lim­ ited understanding of lives and livelihoods of the rural poor in the developing world, and a fallacy of scale that results from the particular ways in which we have come to our understandings of these live­ lihoods and their potential impact on climate