Sustainability, natural capital and climate change in Kuwait

We explore the challenge of sustainability in Kuwait and, in doing so, explore three distinct (but related) questions surrounding this. First, we assess development prospects in Kuwait using metrics of national wealth and natural capital. Secondly, we construct a comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory for Kuwait. Third, we provide a risk assessment for Kuwait of climate change impacts by combining an economic model with different climate scenarios relevant to Kuwait’s food security. Our findings on wealth accounting and our GHG inventory point to the importance of strengthening, and extending, statistical systems in Kuwait. The benefits of this would be improved sustainability benchmarks (against which official national savings commitments can be evaluated) and a more robust basis for judging GHG reduction strategies (given our finding that existing data sources underestimate Kuwait emissions). Moreover, understanding climate risks for Kuwait is crucial to prudent assessment of development prospects. We show that food security is a useful starting point for this and investigate the impacts of changing world food prices on the cost of imports and scope for substituting for domestic activities in both the food. production and processing sectors