Tracking future trajectories of extreme poverty within internally consistent scenarios is necessary to monitor progress towards the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals and to address the challenges posed by climate change globally.

Extreme poverty projections can help us assess the present and future obstacles to climate adaptation at a global level. Climate change constitutes a significant risk to potential poverty reduction efforts and its impact is more adverse for poor people. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita projections in the context of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP, see Crespo Cuaresma, 2017, and Dellink et al, 2017) present coherent, narrative-consistent trajectories of average income for most countries of the world. However, getting a deep understanding of the interaction between climate change and economic trends requires complementing income per capita projections with information on the development of the share of persons living in extreme poverty.

Empirical studies show that poor individuals are more often affected by environmental shocks and may experience negative effects of climate change even in situations when such climatic impacts are very limited in the rest of the population. In addition, the relative income loss of poor households after an environmental shock tends to be larger than for non-poor individuals (see Hallegatte & Rozenberg, 2017). Using the methods put forward in Crespo Cuaresma et al. (2018), projections of extreme poverty rates for practically all countries of the world which correspond to the five SSP scenario narratives and are compatible with existing population and GDP projections.

Tracking current developments in extreme poverty rates and offering realistic projections of its change over time is particularly important to monitor the fulfillment of Sustainable Development Goal 1, which calls for an end to poverty by 2030. For the purpose of providing an evidence-based information platform for policymakers and interested citizens, the poverty projections corresponding to the middle-of-the-road scenario (SSP2) are updated regularly and visualized in the World Poverty Clock.

Future work that incorporates inequality in adaptation capacity across individuals and provides projections of extreme poverty dynamics by population groups (by sex, age, and/or subnational region, for instance) may prove useful in expanding the portfolio of modelling tools required to offer a realistic picture of future socioeconomic scenarios to support climate policy debate at a global level.

References