IPCC Assessment in depth, Part 8: How does climate change affect poverty and progress towards the sustainable development goals?
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- Published on March 8th, 2022
The threat that climate change poses to human well-being and the health of the planet is “unequivocal”, says the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this in-depth Q&A series, Carbon Brief unpacks the key findings of the report and the developments since the IPCC’s last assessment. (Read previous section here)
8. How does climate change affect poverty and progress towards the sustainable development goals?
The eighth chapter of the report deals with the societal consequences of climate change and “irreversible consequences” for the most vulnerable.
It assesses impacts through the lens of poverty, livelihoods and vulnerability of people, aiming to understand “why climate events trigger sudden and slow-onset disasters, and how the most severe, acute and chronic impacts cause and deepen human suffering”.
Vulnerability is defined by the report as “the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected and encompasses a variety of concepts and elements, including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt” to climate-related hazards.
The authors note with high confidence that historical inequalities play a key role:
“Vulnerability is a result of many interlinked issues concerning poverty, migration, inequality, access to basic services, education, institutions and governance capacities often made more complex by past developments, such as histories of colonialism.”
The report says that the world’s poor and their livelihoods are particularly vulnerable to climate change as they have fewer assets, limited access to funding, technology and political influence. These challenges mean they have fewer resources to adapt.
Climate change impacts tend to worsen inequality, it states, given that they disproportionately affect people who are disadvantaged and, therefore, “reduces their ability to cope and recover”.
One of the key factors that drive disproportionate impacts on the poor is lost agricultural income, the report says with high confidence, the second being the impact of hazards on health, “a primary resource that the poor rely on”.
The figure below shows the impacts of 23 climate hazards on nine key livelihood resources on which the world’s poor rely most. Each category of impacts is assigned a confidence statement, based on the weight of evidence assessed in the report: high (red shading), medium (orange) and low (green) confidence.
Additionally, groups that face “[d]isadvantage due to discrimination, gender and income inequalities and lack of access to resources” could have fewer resources to prepare, react, cope and recover from adverse climate change impacts “and are therefore more vulnerable”. This vulnerability can then increase due to climate change impacts in “a vicious cycle”, as shown in the diagram below.
The report highlights new evidence that shows that the risk of “extreme impoverishment” increases for low-income communities experiencing back-to-back climatic events, without time to recover. A “key risk for the poor” is “shocks to specific livelihood assets”, such as land and housing, with the urban and rural landless poor struggling to rebuild them after disasters.
Evidence also exists that climate change impacts drive recurrent poverty and force the poor into persistent extreme poverty traps. This is especially true when wages remain stagnant, costs of living, such as food and healthcare, rise, mobility is restricted and when people face ethnic or social discrimination or conflict.
Even under medium warming scenarios, there is high agreement and enough evidence to suggest that climate risks to poverty “would become severe if vulnerability is high and adaptation is low.”
The chapter assesses the latest literature on how multi-dimensional poverty and human vulnerability are measured and it examines how different indexes rank “global vulnerability hotspots”.
The report states with high confidence that average mortality from floods, drought and storms over the past decade was 15-times higher for “very highly vulnerable” regions and countries – including Mozambique, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Haiti – versus regions and countries ranked “very low” on the scale of vulnerability, such as the UK, Australia, Canada and Sweden. According to studies the report assessed, 11-times more people are adversely affected by a hazard event in “very highly vulnerable” regions and countries, compared to countries with very low vulnerability.
A third of all the evidence the IPCC assessed on livelihood impacts came from just three countries – India, Nepal and Bangladesh, “indicating accumulating experience with livelihood impacts in South Asia”. While evidence of impacts was more limited in literature assessed from Central Asia and the Caribbean, its weight “is still robust”, the authors note. Of all industrialised nations, “there is highest confidence that climate change has impacted livelihood resources in the US”.
According to additional assessments, approximately 3.6 billion people live in low and lower middle-income countries, “which are most vulnerable and disproportionally [sic] bear the human costs of disasters due to extreme weather events and hazards”.
The report states with high confidence that the most vulnerable regions in the world include east, central and west Africa, south Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia and Central America. It estimates that 1.6 to 3.3 billion people are living in countries classified as very highly or highly vulnerable, while 0.8 to 2 billion people reside in regions classified as least vulnerable. The authors add:
“Recent studies suggest that the total population of all countries classified as most highly vulnerable is projected to grow significantly.”
Of all climate hazards, warming trends and drought “pose greatest risks to the widest array of livelihood resources” the report says, given that they are “particularly detrimental” to human and crop health and, therefore, to long-term livelihood security and well-being.
Unlike other hazards that impact largely “private livelihood resources”, such as houses and incomes, the authors note with high confidence that droughts and warming “also affect common pool resources, such as rangeland, fisheries and forests”. Multiple hazards “undermine” these ecosystems that Indigenous Peoples rely on for food security and “have sustainably managed over the long-term”.
One of the studies it assessed found that across 92 developing countries, the poorest 40% of the population experienced losses from climate hazards that were 70% greater than the losses of people with average wealth.
By 2030, it estimates that the number of people living in extreme poverty is set to increase by 122 million.
If warming continues “under high emissions scenarios”, losses and damages will likely be concentrated among the poorest vulnerable populations, the authors say. This is likely to “force economic transitions” among the poorest groups, moving away from agriculture even more rapidly towards cities and other forms of labour.
The authors note with medium confidence that climate change and vulnerability together “threaten the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”, especially progress towards goals such as no poverty (SDG1), zero hunger (SDG2), gender equality (SDG5) and reducing inequality (SDG10).
For example, the report reviews a 2021 study from India that shows increased risk of intimate partner violence after climate disasters. The study’s authors note that “societies vulnerable to climate change may need to prepare for the social disasters that can accompany disasters revealed by natural hazards”.
The report lists several examples to draw attention to these intersecting impacts of poverty, inequality and vulnerability, with lessons for designing adaptation strategies for current and future climate change.
In Box 8.5, the report cites the case of the 2018 drought in South Africa’s western Cape region where a combination of “poor communication” in the early stages of the drought and “lack of trust” in the administration lead to “near-panic” at the threat of “Day Zero” in Cape Town when water would run out.
The report observes that while “ordinary communities” displayed “unprecedented degrees of resilience – including behavioural and attitudinal shifts and technological innovation across the full socio-economic spectrum” – “‘gated adaptation’ by elites” only served to further inequality in access to water.
The case study highlights that African cities must plan for slow-onset shocks and integrate equity and sustainability into disaster planning, while ensuring water tariff models are flexible enough to “prioritise…the urban poor” and do not “deepen existing inequalities”.
The report also uses Box 8.8 to examine the impacts of 2009’s Cyclone Aila on different income groups in Bangladesh and the coping mechanisms and adaptation actions that people adopted.
Migration, infrastructural changes or pursuing alternative livelihoods due to irreparable loss and damage indicate that community or household actions can only address “typical challenges”, such as seasonal shifts in rainfall, the authors say. However, they are less effective in addressing extreme events that have long-lasting impacts, indicating limits to “autonomous” – spontaneous, unplanned – adaptation by affected communities.
The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR-RC) is closely linked to climate justice and acknowledging countries’ different development situations.
The report reviews literature published in the post-Paris Agreement regime for how effectively and adequately it captures CBDR-RC in adaptation provisions. It analyses not just Article 7 of the agreement, where adaptation is found, but also the financial provisions to “operationalise” CBDR-RC.
It points to divergence in literature around questions of whether the most vulnerable nations are prioritised, whether “adaptation is placed on an equal footing as mitigation” or whether little has moved since Paris if the world needs a quantitative goal for adaptation needs.
The authors note elsewhere in the report that “there has been a continued heavy imbalance” in favour of mitigation finance, with adaptation receiving only 5% of tracked climate finance, “around $30bn (compared to $532bn for mitigation)”.
It observes that multilateral and bilateral donors often fail to prioritise highly vulnerable countries for adaptation projects and that foreign funding “may not map onto more recently developed administrative traditions”, leading to the “dominance” of donor-led governance models.
A 2017 study the report cites estimates that less than 10% of climate finance committed from international, regional and national climate funds went to locally focused projects in developing countries between 2003 and 2016. It suggests “a need to rethink” how most affected groups are to build sufficient climate resilience, given fiduciary and governance challenges.
The report lists Burkina Faso, Mali and Zambia as developing countries that are not only among the “most vulnerable to climate change”, but “least able to mobilise the finance needed to adapt to its impacts”. Mali, it notes elsewhere, still reels from the effects of a drought in 1982-84, showing that climate change can have persistent impacts on livelihoods and food security long after an extreme event has passed.
The authors say with high confidence that “the poorest groups in society often lose out” in accessing any climate aid, with women and girls disproportionately impacted.
They also note that least developed countries (LDCs) and small-island developing states (SIDs) currently receive only 14% and 2%, respectively, of total climate finance. They observe that vulnerable, developing countries shoulder additional debt burden linked to their exposure to climate risks. This is “further exacerbated by the recession and debt distress accompanying the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Debt relief by public creditors, green recovery bonds, debt-for-climate swaps or SDG-aligned debt instruments could help vulnerable countries address their debt burden, the authors say, “freeing up” investment for adaptation and “a green economic recovery”.
Next: How is the world adapting to climate change?
All sections:
- What is the IPCC report?
- How is climate change affecting land ecosystems?
- What impact is global warming having on marine life?
- How is climate change affecting the world’s water?
- What does the IPCC report say about impacts on food and agriculture?
- What risks does climate change pose to the world’s cities?
- What does the report say about public health, conflict and migration?
- How does climate change affect poverty and progress towards the sustainable development goals?
- How is the world adapting to climate change?
- What the latest IPCC report says about carbon fee and dividend
Authors:
Aruna Chandrasekhar holds an MSc in environmental change and management from the University of Oxford. She previously worked as a freelance journalist for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, Scroll and Caravan.
Daisy Dunne holds a BSc in biology from the University of Bristol and a science journalism MA from City, University of London. She was The Independent’s climate correspondent from November 2020 to 2021. Prior to this, she was Carbon Brief’s science writer from 2017 to 2020.
Josh Gabbatiss covers climate and energy policy. Josh holds a BSc in zoology from the University of Bristol. He previously worked as science correspondent at The Independent and prior to that was a freelance journalist for a variety of scientific publications including New Scientist and BBC Earth.
