Climate change adaptation and mitigation needs to cut across all poverty reduction efforts, including any post‐2015 architecture. However, low carbon development (LCD) debates to date have been mainly about high‐ and middle‐income countries. There are good reasons why even the poorest countries with low emissions might be interested in pursuing LCD. This article argues that we need to link up pro‐poor policy debates with the low carbon debates as part of a post‐MDG agenda. The article explores several policy responses to LCD and analyses how pro‐poor these policy responses are.