Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-8 (section)

===== 8.3.2.1.2 People residing in most vulnerable versus least vulnerable regions =====

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While global assessments often allow for country rankings, it is similarly important to better understand how many people are living in these different levels of vulnerability. The quantitative assessments underscore that a significantly higher number of people live in countries with very high and high vulnerability compared to the population living in countries classified as having low and very low vulnerability. An analysis that measured the vulnerability of countries according to the INFORM Risk Index and the WorldRiskIndex vulnerability index components, differentiating vulnerability values into seven vulnerability classes found that nearly twice as many people are living in most vulnerable countries compared to the number living in less vulnerable countries ( [[#Birkmann--2021a|Birkmann et al., 2021a]] ). Another study that uses the same data and differentiates vulnerability into five classes (also considering the lack of coping capacity within the INFORM index, see ( [[#Marin-Ferrer--2017|Marin-Ferrer et al., 2017]] )) concludes that about 3.3 billion people are living in countries classified as highly vulnerable, while approximately 1.8 billion people live in countries with low vulnerability ( [[#Birkmann--2022|Birkmann et al., 2022]] ). Additional assessments based on the classification of income groups of countries reveal that approximately 3.6 billion people live in low and lower middle-income countries, which are most vulnerable and disproportionally bear the human costs of disasters due to extreme weather events and hazards (World Bank, 2019b; [[#CRED%20and%20UNDRR--2020b|CRED and UNDRR, 2020b]] ; EC-DRMKC, 2020; [[#UN-DESA--2020a|UN-DESA, 2020a]] ; [[#UN-DESA--2021|UN-DESA, 2021]] ; [[#Birkmann--2022|Birkmann et al., 2022]] ). While these numbers are different, both results underscore that the absolute and relative number of people living in most vulnerable contexts is significantly higher compared to those that live in a country with a low vulnerability status ( [[#Birkmann--2021a|Birkmann et al., 2021a]] ; [[#Birkmann--2022|Birkmann et al., 2022]] ). These differences have also been observed in former years ( [[#Welle--2015|Welle and Birkmann, 2015]] ; [[#Feldmeyer--2017|Feldmeyer et al., 2017]] ).

That means, even moderate changes in the global mean temperature, as identified in the recent IPCC report SR1.5°C ( [[#IPCC--2018c|IPCC, 2018c]] ) and in scientific literature ( [[#Hoegh-Guldberg--2019a|Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2019a]] ), can mean substantial increases in risks for more than 3 billion people due to high levels of vulnerability.

Overall, there is ''robust evidence'' and ''high agreement'' in the recent literature that countries and regions classified as highly vulnerable face multiple development challenges at once, in which high levels of poverty interact with limited access to water and sanitation or with high levels of forced migration and, in some cases, with state fragility making solutions difficult ( [[#Hallegatte--2017|Hallegatte et al., 2017]] ; [[#Marin-Ferrer--2017|Marin-Ferrer et al., 2017]] ; [[#Feldmeyer--2021|Feldmeyer et al., 2021]] ; [[#Garschagen--2021|Garschagen et al., 2021]] ; [[#Birkmann--2022|Birkmann et al., 2022]] ). High levels of vulnerability within these regional clusters are the product of current development challenges, but are often caused by long and complex histories, including issues of colonisation and marginalisation, for example, in hotspots in Africa ( [[#Birkmann--2021a|Birkmann et al., 2021a]] ).

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