Nearly 900m poor people exposed to climate shocks, UN warns

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 17 (AFP): Nearly 80 per cent of the world's poorest, or about 900 million people, are directly exposed to climate hazards exacerbated by global warming, bearing a "double and deeply unequal burden," the United Nations (UN) warned Friday.
"No one is immune to the increasingly frequent and stronger climate change effects like droughts, floods, heat waves, and air pollution, but it's the poorest among us who are facing the harshest impact," Haoliang Xu, acting administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, told AFP in a statement.
COP30, the UN climate summit in Brazil in November, "is the moment for world leaders to look at climate action as action against poverty," he added.
According to an annual study published by the UNDP together with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 1.1 billion people, or about 18 per cent of the 6.3 billion in 109 countries analyzed, live in "acute multidimensional" poverty, based on factors like infant mortality and access to housing, sanitation, electricity and education.
Half of those people are minors.
One example of such extreme deprivation cited in the report is the case of Ricardo, a member of the Guarani Indigenous community living outside Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia's largest city.
Ricardo, who earns a meager income as a day laborer, shares his small single-family house with 18 other people, including his three children, parents and other extended family.