Stephane Hallegatte will be presenting at a GGKP Webinar on 24 November from 3-4:30pm Geneva time, highlighting the new World Bank report "Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty".
Ending poverty and addressing climate change are two major objectives of the international community, but they cannot be considered in isolation. Our new World Bank Group report “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty” brings together these two overarching objectives, and explores how they can be more easily achieved if considered together.
The report demonstrates the urgency of efforts to reduce poverty and the vulnerability of poor people in the face of climate change. It also provides guidance on how to ensure that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building.
The report builds on a set of new studies that show that without action, climate change would likely spark higher agricultural prices and could threaten food security in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And poor people are more heavily affected than the rest of the population. Looking at floods, droughts, heat waves, and climate-sensitive diseases like malaria and diarrhea, we show that poor people are more often affected and lose more when they are affected. In Nigeria, poor people are 50 percent more likely to be flooded, 130% more likely to be affected by a drought, and 80% more likely to experience extreme heat. And because they spend more on food than the rest of the population, poor people are also more vulnerable to an increase in food prices.
As the report points out, poverty reduction is not a one-way street. Many people exit or fall back into poverty each year. The poor live in uncertainty, just one natural disaster or health shock away from losing everything they have. Because climate change worsen these shocks, it makes it even more difficult for poor people to escape – for good – poverty.
The report combines the findings from household surveys in 92 countries that describe demographic structures and income sources with the most recent modeling results on the impacts of climate change on agriculture productivity and food prices, natural hazards such as heat waves, flood and drought, and climate-sensitive diseases and other health consequences. Based on these analysis, it investigates the future impacts of climate change on poverty.
And the good news is that good, climate-informed development can efficiently reduce the impacts of climate change on the poor. This means, in part, providing poor people with social safety nets and universal health care. These efforts will need to be coupled with targeted measures to adapt to climate change and build resilience, such as the introduction of heat-resistant crops and disaster preparedness systems.
The report shows that without this type of development, climate change could force more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.
The immediate implication of these results is that risk management and climate change adaptation investments and projects directly contribute to poverty reduction. And in parallel, poverty reduction and development contribute to reducing future climate change impacts. This is why climate and development policies are better designed together, and why climate finance flows need to be well integrated with development finance. In particular, it will be essential to focus on how climate finance can be used to leverage development finance and private capital, so that it contributes to the sustainable eradication of poverty.
Over the longer term, we will face the limits of what good development and risk management can achieve. Only immediate emissions-reduction policies can limit the long-term impacts of climate change on the poor. Our report shows that these policies need not burden, and can actually benefit, the poor, through the use of proven mechanisms such as social safety nets to mitigate the impact of higher energy prices. The international community should also support poor countries that cannot provide such protection.
The report shows us that the best way forward is to design and implement solutions to end extreme poverty and stabilize climate change as an integrated strategy. Such concerted action, implemented quickly and inclusively, can help ensure that millions of people are not pushed back into poverty by the multi-faceted impacts of climate change.
This blog was first posted on Fin4Dev.org.