Climate driven poverty: Our double burden risk

On the eve of climate-change talks in Belém, Brazil, we must heed the sombre message of a new UN report on how global warming makes our fight against poverty harder than before

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The opening line says it all. The climate crisis, says the 2025 update of the UN’s Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, is “fundamentally changing global poverty.”

Without ambitious efforts to mitigate the fallout, the “double burden of poverty and climate change” could result in the “number of people in extreme monetary poverty nearly doubling by 2050.” More people than ever are at risk of penury, warns the UN. Worse, they are less likely to escape it. At a time we are celebrating the fact that the world has lifted large numbers out of poverty, this study’s finding that climate-related disasters pushed around 32 million people from their homes and communities in 2022 alone makes for sombre reading.