Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-16 (section)

==== 16.1.4.3 Poverty Trends and Socioeconomic Inequalities within and across Societies ====

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Poverty contributes to exposure and vulnerability by limiting access of individuals, households and communities to economic resources and restraining adaptive capacities (e.g., for food and energy supply, or for financing adaptation responses) ( [[#Hallegatte--2017|Hallegatte and Rozenberg, 2017]] ). Over the past decades, until the COVID-19 pandemic, global poverty rates have declined rapidly. Between 1981 and 2015, the share of global population living in extreme poverty (under the international poverty line of USD 1.90 d −1 ) declined from 42% to 10%, leaving 736 million people in extreme poverty, concentrated in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank, 2018). This general reduction in poverty across the world is accompanied by a decrease in vulnerability to many types of climate change impacts ( ''medium confidence'' ). However, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased extreme poverty by about 100 million people in 2020, with disproportionate economic impacts on the poorest, most fragile and smaller countries ( [[#World%20Bank--2021|World Bank, 2021]] ) and significant implications for vulnerability to climate change (see also Cross-Chapter Box COVID in Chapter 7).

The majority of the population in poverty are smallholder farmers and pastoralists, whose livelihoods critically depend on climate-sensitive natural ecosystems, such as through semi-subsistence agriculture where food consumption is primarily dependent on households’ own food production ( [[#Mbow--2019|Mbow et al., 2019]] ). A significant share of this population is affected by armed conflict, which deters economic development and growth and increases local dependence on subsistence agriculture ( [[#Serneels--2015|Serneels and Verpoorten, 2015]] ; [[#Braithwaite--2016|Braithwaite et al., 2016]] ; [[#Tollefsen--2017|Tollefsen, 2017]] ), and aggravating humanitarian challenges (e.g., [[#ICRC--2020|ICRC, 2020]] ). Extreme weather events, particularly droughts, can result in poverty traps keeping people poor or making them poorer, resulting in widening inequalities within and across countries.

Climate risks are also strongly related to other inequalities, often but not always intersecting with poverty. AR5 found with ''very high confidence'' that differences in vulnerability and exposure arise from multi-dimensional inequalities, often produced by uneven development processes. These inequalities relate to geographic location, as well as economic, political and socio-cultural aspects, such as wealth, education, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, age, class/caste, disability and health status ( [[#Oppenheimer--2014|Oppenheimer et al., 2014]] ). Since AR5, a number of studies have confirmed and refined this assessment, especially also regarding socioeconomic inequality and poverty ( [[#Hallegatte--2016|Hallegatte et al., 2016]] ; [[#Hallegatte--2017|Hallegatte and Rozenberg, 2017]] ; [[#Pelling--2019|Pelling and Garschagen, 2019]] ; [[#Hallegatte--2020|Hallegatte et al., 2020]] ). Poor people more often live in exposed areas such as wastelands or riverbanks ( [[#Garschagen--2015|Garschagen and Romero-Lankao, 2015]] ; [[#Winsemius--2018|Winsemius et al., 2018]] ). Also, poor people lose more of their total wealth to climatic hazards, receive less post-shock support from their often-times equally poor social networks, and are often not covered by social protection schemes ( [[#Leichenko--2014|Leichenko and Silva, 2014]] ; [[#Hallegatte--2016|Hallegatte et al., 2016]] ). Countries with high inequality tend to have above-average levels of exposure and vulnerability to climate hazards ( [[#BEH%20UNU-EHS--2016|BEH UNU-EHS, 2016]] ). Many socioeconomic models used in climate research have been found to have a limited ability to capture and represent the poor at a larger scale ( [[#Rao--2019|Rao et al., 2019]] ; [[#Rufat--2019|Rufat et al., 2019]] ). However, an analysis of 92 countries found that relative income losses and other climate change impacts were disproportionately high among the poorest ( [[#Hallegatte--2017|Hallegatte and Rozenberg, 2017]] , see [[#16.2|Section 16.2.6]] ). There have also been advances in detecting and attributing the impacts of climate change and vulnerability at household scale and specifically on women’s agency and adaptive capacity ( [[#Rao--2019|Rao et al., 2019]] ). The distribution of impacts and responses (adaptation and mitigation) affects inequality, not just between countries but also within countries (e.g., [[#Tol--2020|Tol, 2020]] ) and between different people within societies. Distribution has so far largely been thought of in a geographical sense, but identifying those most at risk requires an additional focus on the social distribution of impacts, responses, and resilience, as influenced for instance by differential social protection coverage ( [[#Tenzing--2020|Tenzing, 2020]] ).

Many climate responses interact with all of these global risk drivers. Some raise additional equity concerns about marginalising those most vulnerable and exacerbating social conflicts ( [[#Oppenheimer--2019|Oppenheimer et al., 2019]] ), leading to wider questions about the governance of climate risks (and impacts) across scales. Hence, our assessment of impacts, responses and risks is complemented by the assessment of governance and the enabling environment for risk management in Chapter 17, and of climate resilient development in Chapter 18.

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