Climate change and conflict are the twin forces most capable of wiping out decades of hard-won progress against poverty in a single season. They strike the same communities hardest — those with the least resources to prepare, absorb, or recover. Ending poverty today means confronting the forces most determined to recreate it tomorrow.

Did You Know?

• Climate change could push an additional 130 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 without urgent action — with the devastation concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Small Island Developing States, where communities depend most directly on agriculture, fisheries, and natural resources that are already being destabilized by rising temperatures and extreme weather. (World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report, 2022)
• Conflict-affected and fragile states are home to a rapidly growing share of the world’s extreme poor. The World Bank projects that by 2030, up to 60% of all people living in extreme poverty will be concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected settings — meaning ending poverty is increasingly impossible without directly addressing the violence and instability that traps communities in destitution. (World Bank, 2022)
• Climate shocks are increasingly destroying the assets that poor households depend on to survive. Floods, droughts, and extreme heat events wipe out crops, livestock, homes, and savings — the primary wealth of the world’s poorest families — pushing households that took years to climb above the poverty line back below it in days, and making sustained poverty reduction exponentially harder in climate-vulnerable regions. (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, 2022)
• The people least responsible for climate change bear its heaviest costs. Low-income countries have contributed less than 1% of cumulative global carbon emissions per capita compared to wealthy industrialized nations, yet face the most severe consequences — including crop failure, displacement, and conflict over shrinking resources — creating a profound and measurable injustice at the intersection of climate, poverty, and global inequality. (UNDP / Oxfam Climate Inequality Report)