Nearly 80% of the world's poorest citizens, or 900 million people, are increasingly directly exposed to climate risks, exacerbated by global warming due to climate change, a "double burden" against which the UN is warning today.
Heat waves, droughts, floods... "No one is immune to the increasingly serious consequences of climate change", but "the poorest among us are hit hardest", commented Haoliang Xu, the interim head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP in French, UNDP in English).
At COP30 in Brazil next month, therefore, “the opportunity must be seized by world leaders to consider climate action as action against poverty,” he continued, in a written statement to Agence France-Presse.
The UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) research center publish the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) every year, which now includes data for 109 countries where 6.3 billion people live.
The index takes into account data on malnutrition, child mortality, lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, access to the education system, etc.
According to this year’s findings, 1.1 billion people were living in a state of “acute” multidimensional poverty in 2024. Half of them are minors.
These figures, similar to those of last year, also show a trend towards a consolidation of the level of multidimensional poverty, as illustrated in the text by Ricardo's family.
A member of the indigenous Guarani community, he lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, with his wife, their three children, his parents, his divorced sister and her children. A total of 19 people in a small house, with one bathroom, a meager income, a kitchen that burns wood or coal. None of the children go to school.
4 in just one year
Two regions are particularly affected by poverty: sub-Saharan Africa (565 million poor people) and South Asia (390 million), which are also very vulnerable to climate change.
Against this backdrop, a few weeks before COP30, UNDP and OPHI want to highlight the “overlap” between poverty and exposure to four environmental hazards: extreme heat (at least 30 days with temperatures above 35° Celsius), drought, floods and air pollution (concentration of fine particles).
The result: 78.8% of the poor (887 million people) are directly exposed to at least one of these threats, with extreme heat putting the most at risk (608 million), followed by pollution (577), floods (465) and drought (207).
Some 650 million people are exposed to at least two of these threats, 309 million to three, and 11 million have already faced all four in just one year.
“The overlap between poverty and climate risks is clearly a global problem,” the report insists.
The fact that extreme climate events are multiplying threatens development progress. South Asia has made “success” in the fight against poverty, but with 99.1 percent of its poor exposed to at least one climate risk, the region “must chart a new course, balancing decisive poverty reduction with pioneering climate action.”
With global temperatures already around 1.4°C warmer than in the 19th century, the situation is set to get worse, with projections indicating, for example, that the poorest will be the ones to suffer the worst consequences of rising temperatures.
“In the face of these overlapping pressures, people and the planet must come first, and above all, we must move from description to rapid action,” the text says.
“Aligning poverty reduction, emissions reduction, adaptation to impacts and ecosystem restoration would allow (…) resilient communities, particularly those on the front lines of a warming world, to thrive,” it says.
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