Environmental Degradation and Inequality: Why Climate Change Is a Poverty Multiplier

theconvergencys
Nov 20, 2025
4 min read

By Riya Das Oct. 7, 2024

I – Introduction

Climate change is no longer an environmental issue — it is an economic and social one. The World Bank (2025) warns that by 2030, climate change could push over 130 million people into poverty, reversing decades of progress in global development. Extreme weather events, water scarcity, and food insecurity now compound existing inequalities, creating what scholars call climate apartheid: a world where the rich can buy safety and the poor cannot.

This essay explores how environmental degradation deepens inequality through three mechanisms — economic vulnerability, spatial displacement, and policy bias — and argues that climate resilience must be understood as a question of justice rather than technology.

II – The Economics of Unequal Exposure

Climate change affects everyone, but not equally. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2025) finds that low-income populations experience four to five times higher economic losses from climate disasters relative to income. Coastal and agricultural communities, already dependent on fragile ecosystems, face the steepest costs.

For example, rising sea levels threaten 280 million people globally, predominantly in South and Southeast Asia. Bangladesh alone could lose 11 percent of its land area by 2050, displacing 20 million citizens (Asian Development Bank, 2024). In sub-Saharan Africa, drought-induced yield declines are projected to cut household incomes by up to 30 percent among smallholder farmers.

These are not isolated crises but feedback loops: as livelihoods collapse, families deplete savings, sell assets, or migrate to informal urban settlements where environmental risks — flooding, heat exposure, air pollution — are often worse. Climate shocks thus reproduce poverty rather than alleviating it.

III – Displacement and the Geography of Climate Risk

The International Organization for Migration (2025) estimates that 216 million people could become climate migrants by 2050, making environmental displacement one of the largest population shifts in history. Unlike refugees of war, climate migrants have no legal protection under international law.

Migration is not only a humanitarian issue but also a spatial one. As climate hazards push people out of rural areas, cities must absorb displaced populations without adequate infrastructure. Urban slums expand on floodplains, riverbanks, or heat-prone districts — spaces of both economic marginalization and ecological danger.

In Latin America, for instance, 60 percent of informal settlements are located in high-risk flood zones (UN-Habitat Urban Vulnerability Atlas, 2024). In the United States, climate gentrification has begun to reverse housing patterns, as wealthier residents move to higher-elevation neighborhoods, displacing low-income families into hotter, more flood-prone areas.

Environmental displacement thus mirrors and magnifies existing hierarchies of class and geography. Those least responsible for emissions are those most likely to lose their homes, jobs, and futures.

IV – Policy Bias and the Green Divide

Even solutions to climate change risk reinforcing inequality. Green subsidies, carbon markets, and renewable investments tend to favor high-income consumers and corporations. The OECD Green Growth Report (2025) finds that 60 percent of clean energy subsidies in member states accrue to the richest 20 percent of households, largely through electric vehicle and home solar incentives.

Meanwhile, adaptation funding remains woefully inadequate. Of the $100 billion annual climate finance target pledged under the Paris Agreement, less than 30 percent reaches adaptation projects, and only 8 percent supports local governments directly (UN Climate Finance Standing Committee, 2025). Rural communities without financial infrastructure or technical capacity are systematically excluded from funding mechanisms.

A similar bias appears in carbon markets. While designed to internalize environmental costs, carbon pricing can disproportionately burden poor households through higher energy and food prices. France’s 2018 fuel tax protests, led by the gilets jaunes, revealed how climate policy without social equity can trigger political backlash.

In essence, global environmental governance remains structured by wealth: mitigation for the rich, adaptation for the poor.

V – Climate Justice as Economic Policy

To address environmental inequality, climate policy must shift from market efficiency to distributive justice. Three strategies stand out:

1. Progressive Climate Finance Wealthy nations — responsible for 75 percent of cumulative emissions — must deliver on loss-and-damage commitments. The COP29 Climate Compensation Framework (2025) proposes a global levy on fossil fuel exports that could generate $150 billion annually for resilience projects in low-income countries.

2. Green Jobs for the Poor A just transition must prioritize employment in renewable energy, ecosystem restoration, and climate-adaptation infrastructure. The International Labour Organization (2025) estimates that such investments could create 100 million green jobs by 2030 if training and wage protections are equitably distributed.

3. Localized Adaptation and Decentralized Governance Top-down climate strategies fail when they ignore local knowledge. Kenya’s Community-Based Water Management Initiative (2024), which empowers local councils to allocate adaptation funds, has improved drought resilience in arid regions by 35 percent. Replicating such models globally could democratize resilience.

These reforms link environmental sustainability with social equity — transforming climate action from a technical challenge into a redistributive project.

VI – Conclusion

Climate change is not a “great equalizer.” It is a force multiplier for inequality, turning environmental degradation into economic segregation. As the planet warms, the gap between those who can insulate themselves from risk and those who cannot will define the new global order.

The real question, then, is not whether humanity will adapt to climate change, but who will. If adaptation remains a privilege rather than a right, the world’s response will deepen the injustice at the heart of the crisis. The only sustainable path forward is one where environmental policy doubles as social policy — where saving the planet means saving its people, equally.

Works Cited (MLA)

World Bank Poverty and Climate Report 2025. World Bank, 2025.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report 2025. IPCC, 2025.
Asian Development Bank Climate Migration and Resilience Outlook 2024. ADB, 2024.
International Organization for Migration Global Displacement Data 2025. IOM, 2025.
UN-Habitat Urban Vulnerability Atlas 2024. UN-Habitat, 2024.
OECD Green Growth Report 2025. OECD, 2025.
UN Climate Finance Standing Committee Annual Report 2025. United Nations, 2025.
COP29 Climate Compensation Framework Proposal 2025. UNFCCC, 2025.
International Labour Organization Green Jobs Report 2025. ILO, 2025.