Poverty and climate change
Poverty and climate change are deeply interconnected issues affecting millions around the globe, particularly in developing nations. As global temperatures rise, the most vulnerable populations are bearing the heaviest burdens, with climate-related disasters significantly impacting their livelihoods and health. In regions like sub-Saharan Africa, mortality rates due to climate change are alarmingly high, underscoring the urgent need for intervention. Droughts, floods, and extreme weather have not only increased food insecurity but have also led to outbreaks of diseases, exacerbating the health crisis among impoverished communities.
The economic repercussions of climate change are profound, with developing countries facing increased humanitarian costs and reduced agricultural productivity, which can lead to higher poverty rates. International efforts, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, aim to address these challenges by linking poverty alleviation with sustainable environmental practices, though financial support has often fallen short of targets. As climate impacts worsen, the risk of civil conflict and geopolitical tensions may rise, further entrenching disparities and hindering progress toward a more equitable global society. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for those seeking to explore solutions that address both environmental sustainability and poverty reduction.
Poverty and climate change
Extreme or prolonged climate changes affect poor people’s ability to secure a basic standard of living, reducing access to drinking water, threatening food security, and exacerbating health problems. Low crop yields, famines, and landmass erosion are expected to force millions of Earth’s poorest people to leave their homes and seek better conditions elsewhere.
Background
Rises in average global temperatures will most adversely affect the world’s poor and place at risk international efforts to eradicate poverty. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate-related adversities that have already affected millions of people. The $25 billion spent annually on humanitarian responses to disasters will face sharp increases if global warming continues.
What Is Known
Estimated deaths due to climate change are concentrated in the poorer regions of the globe. In 2000, mortality per million persons ranged from lows of 0–2 throughout countries in the more affluent Northern Hemisphere to highs of 70–100 in the poorest regions of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, 96 percent of climate disaster related deaths have taken place in developing nations, and climate change has become the single biggest health threat facing humanity. The area of the world stricken by drought doubled between 1970 and the early 2000s, turning even fertile land in Africa to desert. According to the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, drought increased in duration and frequency by one third from 2000 to 2022.
From 1970 through 2019, 50 percent of disasters were climate or weather related, resulting in 45 percent of all reported deaths and 74 percent of economic losses. Of those deaths, 91 percent occurred in developing nations. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch affected more than 25 percent of households in Honduras, led to a 7 percent drop in agricultural output, and increased the nation’s poverty rate significantly. The loss of livestock to Rift Valley disease from the 1997–98 El Niño resulted in a billion-dollar ban by the Gulf States on trade from East Africa. Following the 2000 floods in Mozambique, the country’s real annual growth rate fell by 7 percent. In 2002, flooding in Bangladesh damaged 20 percent of crops and left 1.4 million people food insecure. In 2022, floods submerged parts of Pakistan, displacing more than seven million people and causing billions of dollars of damage to a population that lacks the insurance policies of western nations. Also, in 2022, heatwaves in India and Pakistan and droughts in China left populations vulnerable to food scarcity, a major impact of climate change.
Climate change brings the risk of increases in serious diseases. Subsequent Hurricane Mitch flooding increased the incidence of cholera fourfold in Guatemala and sixfold in Nicaragua. Since 1940, El Niño-related floods increased the severity of cholera in Bangladesh. Longer rainy seasons increased malaria in parts of Rwanda and Tanzania and diarrhea in young children in Gambia. In 2022, the journal Nature reported this trend had continued with climate change exacerbating more than 200 infectious diseases and also causing an uptick in non-transmissible conditions and environmental hazards. The conditions resulting from climate change bring people, infectious organisms, and treacherous animals in close contact with each other.
Anticipated Consequences
By 2020, drought reduced African farming harvests by 50 percent. In 2022, one in three Africans were affected by water scarcity, with 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone lacking access to clean drinking water. In 2019, 1.8 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world's population, were experiencing a water crisis. Of the seventeen nations most affected, twelve were in the Middle East and northern Africa.
By 2035, glaciers in the Himalayas are likely to melt to such an extent that the water supply of three-quarters of a billion people in Asia would be severely compromised. By 2050, rising sea levels, floods, and drought could render more than 200 million people homeless. The number of people at risk of annual flooding alone is expected to increase from 75 million to 206 million, with 90 percent of those at risk within Africa and Asia.
By 2070, rainfall in the wet season in Pakistan could increase by 5 to 50 percent, which would have significant impacts on the annual yield of cotton, the country’s main cash crop, and thereby affect Pakistani prospects for economic growth, trade, and foreign investment. The world’s percentage of people at risk from malaria is expected to increase from 40 percent to 80 percent by 2080, severely taxing many countries’ and the international community’s health care systems.
Who Is Doing What to Help
The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At the third conference of the UNFCCC in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted. Fearing that stabilizing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would adversely affect its economy, the United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
In addition to the UNFCCC, over twenty-five other organizations constitute the United Nations Systems Work on Climate Change, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Commission on sustainable development (CSD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Under United Nations auspices, the September 8, 2000, Millennium Declaration, signed by 189 countries, identified poverty eradication and environmental stability as two of eight interrelated millennium development goals (MDGs). The World Bank’s World Development Report, 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty and the United Nations-commissioned Human Development Report, 2007/2008 also linked poverty reduction goals to sustainable environmental strategies. International figures such as former US vice president and 2007 Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore and rock singer Bono have taken up the cause of linking poverty reduction with sustainable development at world forum events. When the Paris Climate Agreement replaced the Kyoto Protocol in 2016, work continued on environmental stability and poverty eradication. The Agreement promised one hundred billion dollars in financial aid to developing nations to help combat climate change and its economic implications. By 2020, however, this aid, funded largely by developed nations, had only reached half of its target goal.
Linking poverty reduction with environmentally sustainable initiatives may work at cross purposes. Reducing trade barriers and promoting tourism to enhance economic growth increase the use of the transport sector, which accounts for about 25 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Neither international aviation nor shipping was included in the national emission-control targets set under the Kyoto Protocol. This changed with the Paris Climate Agreement, where transportation was made a critical issue, and targets were set for the reduction of emissions from transportation and shipping by 2050.
The United Nations encourages nations to prepare themselves for extreme variations in climate. Many developing countries such as Bangladesh and Malawi, as well as more affluent countries such as Australia, use the UN National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) framework. As of 2017, fifty-one countries participated in the NAPA framework. In 2022, about sixty-one low-income countries participated in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) process, which incorporates climate adaption strategies, as required for receiving debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and concessional assistance from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Context
Climate change has become one of the definitive human development issues of the twenty-first century, as Great Britain’s 2006 Stern Review suggested and the Human Development Report, 2007/2008 contended. In 2021, the World Health Organization confirmed this with their reports on climate change and health which confirmed the issue remained one of the biggest threats to humanity. Increased exposure to drought, more intense storms, floods, and environmental stress will dilute efforts of the world’s poor to build a better life. Failure to meet climate-related challenges would consign the poorest 40 percent of the world’s population, some 3.15 billion people, to a future of increased socioeconomic destitution and diminished opportunity. It would exacerbate socioeconomic disparities within countries, increasing the likelihood of civil conflicts and undermining efforts to build a more inclusive pattern of globalization, and it would raise the prospects of geopolitical confrontations between developed nations such as the United States and developing ones such as China as they compete for scarce resources.
Key Concepts
developing countries: poor, primarily agricultural or island nations, many of which are located in the Southern Hemispheremillennium development goals (MDGs): a set of objectives for economic development adopted by the United Nations in 2000vulnerability to climate change: the risk that climate variability and extremes will cause a decline in the well-being of a given group or entity
Bibliography
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