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UN: Nearly 80 percent 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 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 percent 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.
The house has only one bathroom, a wood- and coal-fired kitchen, and none of the children are in school.
“Their lives reflect the multidimensional realities of poverty,” the report said.

- Prioritizing ‘people and the planet’ -

Two regions particularly affected by such poverty are sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia — and they are also highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
The report highlights the connection between poverty and exposure to four environmental risks: extreme heat, drought, floods, and air pollution.
“Impoverished households are especially susceptible to climate shocks as many depend on highly vulnerable sectors such as agriculture and informal labor,” the report said.
“When hazards overlap or strike repeatedly, they compound existing deprivations.”
As a result, 887 million people, or nearly 79 percent of these poor populations, are directly exposed to at least one of these threats, with 608 million people suffering from extreme heat, 577 million affected by pollution, 465 million by floods, and 207 million by drought.
Roughly 651 million are exposed to at least two of the risks, 309 million to three or four risks, and 11 million poor people have already experienced all four in a single year.
“Concurrent poverty and climate hazards are clearly a global issue,” the report said.
And the increase in extreme weather events threatens development progress.
While South Asia has made progress in fighting poverty, 99.1 percent of its poor population exposed to at least one climate hazard.
The region “must once again chart a new path forward, one that balances determined poverty reduction with innovative climate action,” the report says.
With Earth’s surface rapidly getting warmer, the situation is likely to worsen further and experts warn that today’s poorest countries will be hardest hit by rising temperatures.
“Responding to overlapping risks requires prioritizing both people and the planet, and above all, moving from recognition to rapid action,” the report said.

LAS CUEVAS: Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, condemned on Thursday a recent US strike on a small boat in Caribbean waters that killed six people, calling it “a new set of extrajudicial executions.”
He called on the UN Security Council to investigate what he called a “series of assassinations,” noting there have been five lethal attacks and 27 reported deaths since the strikes in the Caribbean began in September, targeting what US officials say are suspected drug traffickers.
Among those believed to be killed in the latest strike that occurred Tuesday are two fishermen from Trinidad and Tobago, whom Moncada referenced in his speech.
As Moncada spoke at the UN on Thursday, people in the sleepy fishing town of Las Cuevas in northern Trinidad mourned the disappearance of Chad Joseph. His relatives believe he was killed in the strike, although they offered no other evidence that he was aboard the boat that was hit.
“People are crying. Why is Donald Trump destroying families?” Afisha Clement, Joseph’s cousin, told The Associated Press.
She said Joseph had moved to Venezuela six months ago and was working on farms in hopes of earning more money.
But in recent weeks, Clement said he told the family that he was disappointed with the money he was making and planned to come back home.
On Tuesday, he boarded a boat bound for Trinidad and was expected to arrive on Wednesday, Clement said.
But no one has heard from him from since then.
His family has called and texted him to no avail as they condemned the strikes.
“He was a quiet person,” Christine Clement, Joseph’s grandmother, said from her living room. “He has left the whole village in sadness.”
The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, a local newspaper, reported that also missing is a man only identified as “Samaroo.”
At UN headquarters, Moncada held up the newspaper’s front page that detailed the lives of the two men from Trinidad.
“There is a killer prowling the Caribbean,” Moncada said. “People from different countries…are suffering the effects of these massacres.”
Only a couple of miles separate Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago at their closest point, and the ongoing military strikes have spooked fishermen in the twin-island nation.
“There is no justification at all,” Moncada said. “They are fabricating a war.”
The administration of US President Donald Trump has said it considers alleged drug traffickers as unlawful combatants who must be met with military force.
Democrats have said the strikes violate US and international law, while some Republicans have sought more information on the strikes and their legal justification.
Meanwhile, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has praised the first strike on a boat suspected of carrying drugs in the southern Caribbean and said that all traffickers should be killed “violently.”
The US began building its maritime forces in the Caribbean earlier this year in an unprecedented fashion not seen in recent times.
“The United States is overseeing a seismic reordering of defense priorities and assets to the Western Hemisphere,” stated a recent report from the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
It noted that the US territory of Puerto Rico has provided “the lion’s share of such infrastructure” as the US military seeks airfields and ports in the Caribbean region as concerns over the strikes grow.
“The administration’s declaration of war against drug cartels has raised a host of legal, ethical and moral questions, and while the declaration of a state of armed conflict has offered some legal foundation, this is already facing fierce domestic scrutiny,” the center stated in its report.