By Krishna Jha
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2025, brought out recently by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme, is basically a caution against the looming danger, and not just a statistical update. It is a caution to the world’s conscience against the destructive measures, an alarming reminder that poverty and climate change are no longer separate challenges. The deepening inequality and the intense human suffering at a global scale are yet to be taken to the centre stage. The data in the report called “Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards” brings out how the hazards in their multiplicity keep bearing with them the influence of concurrent climate risk.
At least, around 651 million poor people experience two or more concurrent climate risks, and 309 million are exposed to three or four simultaneously. In such areas, the incidence of poverty is 24.8 per cent, compared to 14.4 per cent in less exposed regions. The findings underline a grim truth, that is climate change is not only undoing decades of poverty reduction but is actively deepening inequalities between and within countries. There is a visible shift in how we understand deprivation. It has a valued data for the first time, about poverty, measuring deprivations in health, education, and living standards with exposure to four major climate hazards: extreme heat, drought, floods, and air pollution. The outcome is a stark, data-driven narrative of a “double burden”, where nearly 80 per cent of the world’s poorest people live in regions simultaneously affected by one or more climate hazards.
As the MPI 2025 says, 1.1 billion people across 109 developing countries continue to live in acute multidimensional poverty. Of these, 887 million reside in areas facing at least one climate hazard. The relationship between poverty and environmental stress is more intense and self-reinforcing. As poverty goes up, vulnerability to climate shocks rise, and those shocks, in turn, exacerbate deprivation. The data reveal how multiple hazards compound the crisis. It is true that those countries that belong to low income groups suffer from intense poverty.
The report’s most surprising finding is that nearly two-thirds of the world’s multi-dimensionally poor, about 740 million people, live in middle-income countries. The assumptions about the understanding of where poverty is concentrated and how development priorities are structured are all challenged today. Also in these countries, urbanization is rapid. Industrial expansion is fast and also unplanned. As a result unregulated economic growth often worsens environmental degradation, since there is exposure to air pollution and also water, either its absence or contamination.
Lower-middle-income countries carry the heaviest burden of overlapping risks, with 548 million poor people exposed to at least one major hazard. Air pollution alone affects 577 million poor people, while over 600 million remain deprived of clean cooking fuel, safe sanitation, and adequate housing. The most tragic dimension of this crisis are the children under 18 that constitute only a third of the population covered by the MPI, yet they represent more than half of all multi-dimensionally poor people, roughly 586 million. Their poverty rate (27.8 per cent) is more than twice that of adults (13.5 per cent).
UNICEF has noted that this convergence of deprivation and exposure is fundamentally a crisis of child rights. Adding to the urgency, the report finds that global progress in poverty reduction has stalled since 2018. Across most regions, improvements have either plateaued or reversed in the post-pandemic years. Of the 92 subnational regions examined, poverty reduction stagnated in 83.
The future projections are sobering. The countries with the highest levels of multidimensional poverty are the very ones expected to experience the most severe temperature increases. Under a high-emission scenario, these nations could face 92 more days of extreme heat per year by the end of the century compared to 62 additional days in countries with low poverty levels. This disparity underscores the deep injustice of the climate crisis. Those least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are bearing the heaviest costs, not only economically but existentially. The world’s poorest are trapped in a vicious cycle: vulnerable because they are poor, and poorer because they are vulnerable.
The geographical concentration of these overlapping crises remains heavily unequal. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa together account for 83.2 per cent of the world’s multi-dimensionally poor. In South Asia, impressive progress in poverty reduction over the past two decades, including the remarkable fact that India alone lifted more than 400 million people out of multidimensional poverty between 2005–06 and 2019–21, is now under threat.
Nearly every poor individual in the region (99.1 per cent) lives in an area exposed to at least one climate hazard. More alarmingly, 59 per cent (226 million people) face three or four concurrent hazards. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the picture is equally grim. Nearly half of all people in acute poverty, about 565 million, live here, and 193 million of them are exposed to multiple hazards. Seven out of the 10 MPI indicators show higher deprivation rates in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia, making it the most acutely impoverished and environmentally fragile region in the world.
The findings of the MPI 2025 are unambiguous: poverty alleviation and climate action can no longer be pursued in isolation. The interdependence between human development and environmental sustainability demands integrated strategies that address both simultaneously. Governments must prioritise climate-resilient livelihoods, adaptive social protection systems, and green infrastructure investments. (IPA Service)
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