Long-term poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa can only be achieved through integrated packages of support to help people on the lowest incomes cope with climate crises. This is the finding of the new IDS Bulletin on ‘Climate Resilience and Poverty Reduction’, published today.
Growing evidence shows that rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and increasingly frequent extreme weather, such as droughts, floods, cyclones, and storms are threatening agricultural systems, eroding household assets, and worsening existing social and economic vulnerabilities. Therefore, the impacts from climate-related shocks, combined with existing hardships, is pushing people on the lowest incomes further into poverty and makes it harder for them to escape poverty for good.
The authors call for co-ordinated action across sectors to increase climate resilience for people who are living in and near poverty. They argue that this is the key to achieve lasting positive change for individuals, households, communities and nations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Preventing the “downward climate-poverty spiral”
Vidya Diwakar, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies and Deputy Director of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), said:
“Climate change is now one of the most significant threats to poverty reduction across East and Southern Africa. As the number of people living in poverty across many countries in Africa is rising, we must use the evidence available to get to grips with how to best build climate resilience alongside poverty reduction strategies to prevent the downward climate-poverty spiral that so many face.”
In addition, households headed by women or young people, and communities in areas most affected by climate and environmental change face disproportionately higher risks as they are more vulnerable to poverty and are often less resilient to crises.
The new research in the IDS Bulletin, published by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is authored by a group of global researchers, including from Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, South Africa, the UK and China. The academic articles share the devastation caused by climate-related shocks to vulnerable households in East and Southern Africa, and the strategies and routes that successfully build climate resilience for people in poverty, plus recommendations for decision-makers.
Evidence from Zambia
The research in Zambia shows that while wealthier households located in a floodplain are still very exposed to flooding, these households can recover. Though highly marginalised populations regularly navigate adversity amidst climate change, they might find this process of recovery obstructed.
For example, a poor household exposed to drought is not only vulnerable to the immediate crisis but also remains vulnerable to other factors related to their poverty, for example if they have small landholdings or infertile soil. This means that even a one-off drought has the potential to make their poverty worse longer-term. Additional crises, such as ill-health can drive them further into poverty. In Zambia, a country that faces a greater intensity of climate-related crises and has a growing number of people living in poverty, the extent to which poor and vulnerable people can become more resilient to climate change is a critical policy question.
Recommendations for an integrated approach
The researchers recommend that an integrated, joint approach across multiple sectors – such as climate initiatives working with social protection programmes and gender-focused poverty reduction initiatives – is needed to build climate resilience and support people’s pathways out of poverty.
They also stress the importance of moving from fragmented, reactive responses to preventative, inclusive and locally responsive systems that help people absorb shocks, anticipate risks, adapt livelihoods, and transform the structural conditions that keep people vulnerable.
Other recommendations include:
- Make climate finance more poverty focused, with a shift towards gender-sensitive, poverty-targeted, locally led programmes rather than one-off projects.
- Expand and strengthen social protection systems, especially for chronically poor and highly vulnerable households. Current coverage is often too limited to prevent people from falling deeper into poverty after climate shocks.
- Invest more in early warning systems and on post-crisis recovery, not just on short-term disaster response. This includes climate forecasting, risk monitoring, local communication systems, disaster preparedness and recovery grants for businesses and savings support.
