Kathmandu: Nearly 80 percent of the world’s poorest people, about 900 million individuals—are directly exposed to climate hazards intensified by global warming, the United Nations warned on Friday, calling it a “double and deeply unequal burden.”

“No one is immune to increasingly frequent and severe impacts of climate change such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and air pollution, but the poorest are hit hardest,” said Haoliang Xu, acting administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The warning comes ahead of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil this November, which Xu said must be viewed as “an opportunity to link climate action with poverty reduction.”

According to a joint UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative report, 1.1 billion people—18 percent of the population across 109 countries live in “acute multidimensional poverty,” lacking access to education, healthcare, electricity, and safe housing. Half of them are children.

The report highlights the overlap between poverty and exposure to environmental risks such as extreme heat, drought, floods, and pollution. It found that 887 million poor people are directly affected by at least one of these threats, while 11 million face all four within a single year.

Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia remain the most vulnerable regions, with 99 percent of the poor in South Asia exposed to at least one climate hazard.

The report warns that rising global temperatures threaten to erase hard-won development gains unless urgent, integrated action is taken. “Responding to overlapping risks requires prioritizing both people and the planet—and moving from recognition to rapid action,” it said.

– AFP