Green Shoots: 365 Days of Climate Awareness 335 – Poverty, Livelihoods and Sustainable Development

Climate change hazards easily compound with other standing conditions such as physical location and poverty level, themselves closely linked. In both rural (the Ganges delta) and urban (Jakarta) settings, low-lying, flood-prone regions are where the poor congregate. Diseases are communicated more easily in crowded, hot conditions where there is an abundance of stagnant water, and infrastructure is lacking for events like disease outbreaks, flood or fire events, or heat waves.

All illustrations from IPCC AR6 Vol 2, Chap 8. Cross-correlation of two vulnerability indices (INFORM and World Risk).

Global population density and vulnerability, with incident-related deaths 2009-2019.

All warming scenarios, from 1.9°C/3.4°F to 8.5°C/15.3°F, constrain humanity’s capacity for response. Vulnerable regions are not evenly spread around the world. Regions more susceptible to drought, or flooding, or cyclone activity, wildfire, or loss of permafrost, will demand more attention and remediation in decades to come. The worsened levels of crisis in those locations will complicate efforts to adapt and remediate, particularly through poverty traps (where increased earnings are offset by
lessened public support) where the population’s means do not increase despite greater apparent wealth, and through growing food insecurity (for a wide range of reasons already discussed: drought, flooding, political and social upheaval, and crop diseases).

Global population density and vulnerability, with changes in drought risk.

Global refugee camps and annual days over 35 deg C/63 deg F.

As years pass and researchers gather additional data, the economic effects of global waring become increasingly clear. Already-existing disparities in impacts, where poorer regions and countries are physically at greater risk, will grow worse in decades to come. The poorest will likely, due to conditions increasingly hostile to agriculture, be forced to relocate and become refugees or wage-earners in nearby cities, adding to the labor supply and further depressing wages. As with physical systems, in social and economic systems, the more upheaval occurs, the likelier it becomes that one or more tipping points will be passed, where an entirely new structural form of normalcy, with irrevocably changed population densities and flows of money, or worse, the system enters into a spiraling collapse.