Exposure To Climate Shocks Poverty And Happiness

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

The continued decline in ...

This paper analyzes environmental reliance, poverty, and climate vulnerability among more than 7,300 households in forest adjacent communities in 24 developing countries. The data are from the detailed, quarterly income recording done by the Poverty Environment Network project. Observed income is combined with predicted income (based on households' assets and other characteristics) to create four categories of households: income and asset poor (structurally poor), income rich and asset poor (stochastically non-poor), income poor and asset rich (stochastically poor), and income and asset rich (structurally non-poor). The income and asset poor generate 29 percent of their income from environmental resources, more than the other three categories. The income poor are more exposed to extreme and variable climate conditions. They tend to live in dryer (and hotter) villages in the dry forest zones, in wetter villages in the wet zones, and experience larger rainfall fluctuations. Among the self-reported income-generating responses to income shocks, extracting more environmental resources ranks second to seeking wage labor. Given high reliance on forest and other environmental resources, a concerning finding is that, in the Africa subsample (dominated by dry forests), the rate of forest loss is more than four times higher for the income & asset poor compared with the income & asset rich. Special attention should be given to the poorest households in dry areas, predominantly in Africa. They are (already) exposed to more extreme climate conditions, they suffer the highest forest loss, and the forest benefits are at risk in global warming scenarios.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Environmental Policy, grade: 72, Queen Mary University of London (School of Politics and International Relations), language: English, abstract: Inequality and climate change have emerged as dominant themes of political and social enquiry. This study aims to link these two themes to develop an understanding of the interrelationship between inequality and climate change vulnerability. How does inequality shape vulnerability among different socio-economic groups? How is the vulnerability-inequality nexus related to the process of globalization? A number of negative outcomes of inequality are associated with factors contributing to climate change vulnerability. These will be traced within a discussion of two case studies focusing on Papua New Guinea and Tonga, two countries facing enormous climate risks. The study finds that globalization creates particular environments in which climate change vulnerability may be facilitated in the absence of targeted measures. These environments are particularly susceptible to the negative implications of inequality. Thus not only is inequality problematic from the perspective of access to resources, but also in the sense that political and social institutions are less responsive to the most vulnerable segments of unequal societies. In particular, the issues which create vulnerable environments are related to formal and informal social security as well as urbanization.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty outcomes by examining three questions: the (static) impact on poor people's livelihood and well-being; the impact on the risk for non-poor individuals to fall into poverty; and the impact on the ability of poor people to escape poverty. The paper proposes four channels that determine household consumption and through which households may escape or fall into poverty (prices, assets, productivity, and opportunities). It then discusses whether and how these channels are affected by climate change and climate policies, focusing on the exposure, vulnerability, and ability to adapt of the poor (and those vulnerable to poverty). It reviews the existing literature and offers three major conclusions. First, climate change is likely to represent a major obstacle to a sustained eradication of poverty. Second, climate policies are compatible with poverty reduction provided that (i) poverty concerns are carefully taken into account in their design and (ii) they are accompanied by the appropriate set of social policies. Third, climate change does not modify how poverty policies should be designed, but it creates greater needs and more urgency. The scale issue is explained by the fact that climate will cause more frequent and more severe shocks; the urgency, by the need to exploit the window of opportunity given to us before climate impacts are likely to substantially increase.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.