UN Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025: Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazard: Summary, Review, and Commentary

 This UN report begins with the following statement:

“The climate crisis is fundamentally changing global poverty. It has left more people than ever at risk of poverty and less likely to escape it.”

     This is concerning because many people, including many scientists, do not believe we are in a climate crisis. The report links poverty to climate risks, saying they reinforce one another. That may be true in a few cases, but I do not think it is true for the bulk of those in poverty. I would say that things like inadequate energy access and electricity access contribute more to poverty than climate change. The report talks about “climate-related disasters,” but these likely include any kind of disaster related to weather, which, as we know, have always been happening.

     It seems that this latest version of the report focuses on the relationship between climate hazards and poverty:

 “This 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, for the first time, overlays data on climate hazards and multidimensional poverty to assess how exposed poor people are to climate shocks.”

     Part I notes four key climate hazards: high heat, drought, floods, and air pollution. Some of those things may also be considered weather hazards, unrelated to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Air pollution, at least particulate matter pollution, is quite hazardous to humans, but in terms of climate, the aerosol particles promote temporary climate cooling. Thus, I would argue that air pollution is an environmental hazard but not a climate hazard. Floods and droughts are affected by many other factors besides anthropogenic GHG emissions. The report presents climate hazards and poverty as a double burden where these two are inseparably related, without providing convincing evidence, as if merely replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy would reduce and eliminate poverty, which is an absurd idea. The report seeks to strengthen the links between the two, which seems to me an attempt to prove that the energy transition needs to happen faster.

     The first of the key findings of the report gives five statements, which I will look at one at a time.

    Four of the five things stand out here for me: the finding that twice as many children live in poverty as adults, the finding that two-thirds of people in poverty live in middle-income countries, the finding that 83.2% of people in poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and the finding that 83.5% of people in poverty live in rural areas.

     Certainly, these people, families with many children living in middle-income countries in rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are most exposed to the elements and to weather events, including those influenced by climate change.

     Second is the finding that lack of access to clean cooking fuels (such as propane), sanitation, adequate housing, and adequate nutrition. These are things that can be fixed by governments, aid organizations like the UN, other initiatives, and businesses that can offer opportunities.

     Third is the finding that progress in reducing poverty has been uneven, with some successes and some continuing failures.

     Fourth, they emphasize that those in poverty are more exposed to climate risks.

     The report does note that post-Pandemic trends indicate that there has been stagnation in addressing multidimensional poverty. Poverty reduction slowed down after the COVID pandemic.

     Part II explores how poverty and climate hazards overlap. This part of the report shows that tropical and subtropical regions are most affected by high-heat, droughts, flooding, and air pollution. This is true, but again, these hazards are not strictly climate hazards. They are also weather hazards, lack of adaptation hazards, inadequate pollution abatement hazards, inadequate flood control hazards, inadequate drought mitigation hazards, etc. They are also better termed environmental hazards than climate hazards, and the report does sometimes call them environmental hazards. People in poverty are more exposed to environmental hazards. This is true. They are also likely more exposed to climate hazards, but the ones given in the report are really either just environmental hazards or both environmental and climate hazards. We can’t just flip a switch that turns fossil fuels off to make these problems go away.

     Below, they show that middle-income countries can have high poverty rates.

     The report emphasizes countries facing multiple climate hazards as they define them and offers some practical solutions.

“Overlapping pressures make building resilience an urgent priority. This calls for strengthening local capacities to adapt, including through measures such as nature-based solutions, climate-smart livelihoods and adaptive social protection systems. Equally essential are improved early warning systems, powered by innovative technologies and local partnerships, that can identify at-risk populations and target responses quickly and effectively.”

     There was no mention of improved energy and electricity access.

     The graph below compares multidimensional poverty and monetary poverty and how the poorest are affected by both.

     The report shows “how key environmental stresses intersect with multidimensional poverty.” Again, I will point out that these environmental stresses may not have that much influence from anthropogenic GHG emissions from fossil fuels and so should not be lumped in as part of the so-called “climate crisis.” It is true that global warming influences weather patterns and may exacerbate droughts in some regions, flooding in others, and is likely a major factor for high-heat. For droughts and floods, it is a contributing factor among other contributing factors.

     The report also notes some study limitations:

“While these measures offer valuable insights, they have limitations. Thresholds may not capture local sensitivities, a limitation especially relevant to the metric for heat, which does not consider historical temperature conditions. Humidity, a critical factor in how heat is experienced, is also not captured due to data limitations. Remote sensing data, while essential for achieving global coverage, can overlook microclimatic variation or localized coping strategies. Flood data from EM-DAT may underrepresent smaller or unreported events, particularly in areas with weak reporting systems.” 

     My main problem with the report is the conflating of what should be termed environmental hazards or perhaps climate-related environmental hazards, as climate hazards. It is the same thing the media often does in dubbing extreme weather events and things like wildfires as climate change events, as if burning fossil fuels were their only cause, when in fact it is just one among several influencing factors. Other than that, the report does a good job of attempting to quantify the effects of these climate-related environmental hazards on people in poverty.

 

   

References:

 

Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025: Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards.  United Nations Development Programme. October 2025. mpireport2025en.pdf