Measuring the overlap between climate hazards and multidimensional poverty: a global sub-national assessment

Working paper

Climate hazards and multidimensional poverty reinforce each other but their interaction remains poorly understood. This paper addresses this by providing the first globally comparable subnational analysis of where multidimensional poverty and climate hazards overlap. To conduct this analysis, the 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index is combined with gridded data on four hazards (high heat, drought, floods, and air pollution) for 1657subnational regions in 108 developing countries. The results suggest a strong contemporaneous overlap between multidimensional poverty and climate hazard exposure. Approximately 78.8% of the multidimensional poor, representing 887 million people, live in regions exposed to climate hazards. More than half of poor people live in regions experiencing two or more hazards. An estimated 11 million people live in regions experiencing all four hazards simultaneously. The overlap is regionally concentrated; South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa together account for more than 700 million poor people living in regions experiencing climate hazard exposure. Forward-looking projections demonstrate that the countries with the highest rates of poverty today are the same countries expected to experience the greatest increase in exposure to extreme heat in the future. Three insights can be gathered from this analysis: subnational analysis can identify heterogeneity hidden at the national level, multidimensionally poor people’s exposure to multiple climate hazards is common globally, and future climate risks are distributed asymmetrically, with risks falling most heavily on countries where poor populations are most exposed. These findings highlight the urgency of integrating climate and poverty analyses to understand these mutually reinforcing phenomena.

Authors: Alkire, S; Dehingia, N; Jambrina-Canseco, B; Maher, N; Nogales, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
• Host title: OPHI Research in Progress
• Pages: 1-31
• Series: OPHI Research in Progress
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2025-10-17
• Paper number: 70a
• Language: English
• Keywords: multidimensional poverty; subnational analysis; climate hazards; Multidimensional Poverty Index; poverty measurement; MPI