By Krishna Jha
Robert Frost was not alone, nor it was the only time People were passing through a crisis. But now it is life itself that has started ebbing. Climate has become a threat. Dangers are escalating every day. The river has been drying up. Jungle is aflame with forest fire, heat waves, droughts are incessant as water level keeps going down. With erratic monsoons, pointed out by WMO’s 2024 report, there have been rising sea levels, too. The world is in need of a resilient, climate-smart system that requires urgent, localized adaptation in key sectors like water, agriculture, health, and coastal management. On top of all this, there is growing danger of impoverishment, and also climate crisis. Unless immediate and coordinated action is taken, the world risks reversing decades of progress and deepening the inequalities that define our era.
There has been caution issued by Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme, named as “Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards”. According to the report, poverty and change in climate share almost the same grounds as both have spread into most of the regions of human life. This makes those from the lower depths increasingly prone to climate shocks that in turn cloud over any possibility of respite. The data reveal how multiple hazards compound the crisis. 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 and that is climate change is not only undoing decades of poverty reduction but is actively deepening inequalities between and within countries.
Poverty rules over the lives of 1.1 billion people across 109 developing countries as the MPI 2025 report says. There is hunger pushing a huge number of people towards death every year. Then there are areas unfit for human lives and still face issues of over population. Almost 887 million reside in areas facing at least one climate hazard.
The shocking fact that is revealed by the report is that children in the country are the worst casualty of the crisis. It is the impact of generations. The children under 18 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). Living in poverty already exposes children to malnutrition, inadequate sanitation, and a lack of education. When these conditions are compounded by climate hazards like floods or extreme heat, the effects are devastating, destroying homes, disrupting schooling, and increasing disease risk.
As UNICEF has noted, this convergence of deprivation and exposure is gross violation of child rights. On the other hand the global progress in poverty reduction has also been stalled since 2018. The most painful aspect of the tragedy is that improvements have either been stalled or reversed in the post-pandemic years. Poverty reduction has been found stagnated in 83 out of 92 sub national regions examined. The cumulative effect is clear: the double burden of poverty and climate vulnerability is eroding hard-won gains from earlier decades.
According to report, there are also countries that are facing not only deprivation, poverty itself is multi dimensional. Also people are facing the most severe temperature rise. Those living with the highest levels of multidimensional poverty are the very ones expected to experience the most severe temperature increases. In the context of Green House gas emission, those least responsible for it are bearing the heaviest costs, not only economically but existentially. There are those most vulnerable who are caught in a vicious circle: vulnerable because they are poor, and poorer because they are vulnerable.
The findings of the MPI 2025 are clear and sharp. Both poverty alleviation as well as climate action can no longer be pursued in isolation. The human progress and ecological sustainability are both interdependent and need to be treated simultaneously. There must be environment friendly initiatives to promote adaptive social protection systems, and green infrastructure investments. Development policies should focus on empowering local communities, strengthening their adaptive capacities, and ensuring equitable access to resources and services.
The need for scaled-up international cooperation and climate finance is critical. The global north must move from rhetoric to tangible commitments in technology transfer, capacity building, and financial assistance. The Global MPI 2025 offers more than numbers; it presents a moral imperative. It shows that ending poverty, the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 1), is increasingly inseparable from climate action (SDG 13). The path forward demands an integrated policy approach that places both people and the planet at the centre of development thinking. We must now move beyond acknowledging risks to implementing solutions. The double burden of poverty and climate crisis is no longer a looming threat; it is an unfolding reality. Unless immediate and coordinated action is taken, the world risks reversing decades of progress and deepening the inequalities that define our era.
At a climate summit in Brazil recently, people bemoaned the fractured global consensus on climate action, taking swipes at the climate-denying U.S. government while trying to assure the world they were still on mission.
The message is clear: the fight against poverty is also a fight for climate justice. Only by confronting both together can we hope to build a sustainable and equitable future for all. (IPA Service)
