Climate change and poverty
This phenomenon is defined when poor families become trapped in poverty for at least three generations, have limited to no resources access, and are disadvantaged in means of breaking the cycle.
[10] While in rich countries, coping with climate change has largely been a matter of dealing with longer, hotter summers, and observing seasonal shifts; for those in poverty, weather-related disasters, bad harvest, or even a family member falling ill can provide crippling economic shocks.
With limited access to formal insurance, low incomes, and meager assets, poor households have to deal with climate-related shocks under highly constrained conditions.
[12] In addition, poorer households are heavily impacted by environmental shocks due to the lack of post-shock support from friends and family, the financial system, and social safety nets.
The overlap of these two phenomena, has disproportionately affected different communities and populations throughout the world due to disparities in socio-economic status.
Following the 1995 Chicago heat wave, scholars analyzed the effects of environmental racism on the unequal death rate between races during this crisis.
[14][need quotation to verify] Direct impacts of this phenomenon can be observed through the lack of adequate warning and the failure to utilize pre-existing cooling centers which disadvantaged impoverished groups, and caused particularly devastating effects in Chicago's poorest areas.
Poorer individuals are more susceptible to harm from climate change because they have less access to resources to help them recover from natural disasters.
Climate change could worsen the prevalence of hunger through direct negative effects on production and indirect impacts on purchasing powers.
[21] As the overall climate of the earth warms, changes in the nature of global rainfall, evaporation, snow, and runoff flows will be affected.
Global temperature increases of 3–4 degrees C could result in 330 million people being permanently or temporarily displaced through flooding [19] Warming seas will also fuel more intense tropical storms.
[26] In some areas, such as coastal properties, real estate prices go up because of ocean access and housing scarcity, in part caused by homes being destroyed during storms.
[27] Wealthy homeowners have more resources to rebuild their homes and have better job security, which encourages them to stay in their communities following extreme weather events.
In addition, the direct human pressures that might be experienced include overfishing which could lead to resource depletion, nutrient, and chemical pollution and poor land-use practices such as deforestation and dredging.
[12] Because a changing climate affects the essential ingredients of maintaining good health: clean air and water, sufficient food, and adequate shelter, the effects could be widespread and pervasive.
[5] Other severely affected population groups include women, the elderly, and people living in small island developing states and other coastal regions, mega-cities, or mountainous areas.
When Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012, he recounts, most people in New York City were left without power, while the Goldman Sachs headquarters had a private generator and protection by "tens of thousands of its own sandbags".
An HBRA law is the adoption of a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to address climate change, from both a legal and a policy perspective.
[34] Such redistributions typically have significant gender dimensions; for example, extreme event impacts can lead to male out migration in search of work, culminating in an increase in women-headed households – a group often considered particularly vulnerable.
[38] The National Research Council has identified five climate changes of particular importance to infrastructure and factors that should be taken into consideration when designing future structures.
[39] Heat waves affect communities that live in traditionally cooler areas because many of the homes are not equipped with air conditioning units.
[27] Rising sea levels can be devastating for poor countries situated near the ocean and in delta regions, which experience increasingly overwhelming storm damage.
[27] These issues are made worse for people living in lower income areas and force them to relocate at a higher rate than other economic groups.
[27] In areas where poverty is prevalent and infrastructure is underdeveloped, climate change produces a critical threat to the future development of that country.
Adaptation to climate change will be "ineffective and inequitable if it fails to learn and build upon an understanding of the multidimensional and differentiated nature of poverty and vulnerability".
[27] Bangladesh, having a poorer population, was less prepared for the storm; and the country lacked sufficient weather forecasting systems needed to predict meteorological events.
A country that exemplifies the inequality that is created due to varying affects in different regions by climate change is Nigeria.
They have emphasized managing non-climatic elements which they have no control over and this has helped them adapt faster than most farming communities to climate change.
The main difficulties involved with climate change policy are the timetable of return on investment and the disparate costs on countries.
