Almost 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 whammy” the UN warns against today.
Heatwaves, droughts, floods… “No one is immune to the increasingly serious consequences of climate change”, but “the poorest among us are hit the hardest”, commented Haoliang Xu, the interim head of the United Nations Development Program (PNUD in French, UNDP in English).
Overlap of poverty and climate risks
For example, two regions particularly affected by poverty, sub-Saharan Africa (565 million poor) and South Asia (390 million), are at the same time very vulnerable to climate change.
Against this background, a few weeks before COP30, UNDP and OPHI want to highlight the “overlap” of poverty and exposure to four environmental risks: extreme heat (at least 30 days with temperatures above 35° Celsius), the droughtthe floods and her atmospheric pollution (concentration of microparticles).
Result: 78.8% of the poor (887 million people) are directly exposed to at least one of these threatswith 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 text insists.
The fact that the extreme climate events multiply, threatens development progress.
South Asia has achieved “success” in the fight against poverty, but with 99.1% of the poor population exposed to at least one climate risk, the region “must chart a new path, balancing decisive poverty reduction and pioneering climate action”.
As the global temperature has already risen by around 1.4°C compared to the 19th century, the situation is at risk of worsening further, and forecasts say, for example, that the poorest will be the worst affected by rising temperatures.
“In the face of these overlapping pressures, both populations and the planet must be prioritized, and above all we must move from description to rapid action,” the text says.
“Aligning poverty reduction, cutting emissions (including greenhouse gases), impact adaptation and ecosystem restoration would allow (…) resilient communities to thrive, particularly those on the front lines of a warming world,” it says.
Source: Skai
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