Heat Map of Inequality

Already hot and already poor regions see the steepest rise in inequality in not just wealth, but gender too

- • Parth Singh

There is a kind of inequality that rarely makes headlines. Incomes rise and fall with the seasons, but wealth accumulates and erodes over much longer stretches of time. And as climate change tightens its grip on the global economy, the question that matters is not only who earns less during a heatwave, but who owns less after years of warming. Researchers Naveen Kumar and Dib-yendu Maiti's paper, "Distributional Impacts of Global Warming on Wealth Inequality", turns toward this more permanent layer of disparity. It brings evidence from a sprawling global dataset of 1,000 subnational regions across nearly 30 years to make a simple but unsettling claim that hotter places are becoming more unequal, and warming has a measurable hand in it.

The paper observes that global warming does not strike evenly. Regions that are already hot, and already poor, experience the steepest rise in wealth inequality. The study finds that a 1°C increase in temperature corresponds to a 0.54-unit rise in the wealth Gini coefficient. It is not an explosive number, but inequality does not need to spike dramatically to matter. It can widen slowly, through diminished savings, depreciated assets, a stalled job, among others. Over a generation, such increments accumulate into gulf.