Paper short abstract:

Our paper analyses the overlap between multidimensional child poverty and climate risk. Combining household surveys and global climate model data, we find regions with higher levels of child poverty to also be more exposed to climate risks, especially droughts and crop failures.

Paper long abstract:

We overlap child poverty and climate risks worldwide on a subnational level combining a wide range of data sources. We estimate that 773.5 million children are both living in poverty and are affected by at least one extreme climate risk per year. Adding information on conflicts, we further find that 182.9 million children are even facing a triple burden, affected simultaneously by poverty, climate risk, and armed conflicts.

Using a subset of 64 low- and middle-income countries for which we have comparable estimates of multidimensional child poverty, we investigate more in detail the links between child poverty and six different type of climate risks (wildfires, tropical cyclones, floods, heatwaves, droughts, crop failures). We find that subnational regions with higher levels of child poverty are also more likely to be affected by climate risks in general, as well as by droughts and crop failures in particular. However, we find important differences in such patterns between world regions as well as within countries, suggesting that policy or programmatic responses to build resilience do need to be tailored to the regional risk profile.

[The proposed paper is still work in progress. We are working on a broader theoretical framework to investigate the linkages between child poverty and climate risks. We further plan to include changes in climate risks as well, utilising global climate models.]