_Figure 5 Impacts on shared prosperity and GDP in the poverty/high impact scenario_

# Coming back to the hundreds of scenarios: which socioeconomic conditions lead to the highest climate change impacts?

Finally, in order to check the sensitivity of our climate change impact results to socioeconomic conditions, we run the high impact scenario in the hundreds of baselines previously run. We find that with the high impact scenario, climate change leads to between a few hundreds to 1.2 million additional people in extreme poverty depending on the baseline. These numbers show that our two representative scenarios where the extremes in terms of sensitivity to climate change. Among the hundreds of scenarios, 25% of them have more than 400 000 additional people in extreme poverty because of climate change.

We then run the scenario discovery again, in order to explain the common characteristics of the scenarios that have more than 400,000 additional people into poverty because of climate change. We find that 70% of those scenarios have a high population growth (SSP4 scenario), a low productivity growth for unskilled agriculture workers (less than 3% per year), a relatively high share of jobs in agriculture (more than 33%) and low redistribution levels (less than 12% of GDP). These criteria are very similar to the criteria that led to high poverty and high inequalities in the baseline scenarios, so it is not surprising that we chose one of the worst scenarios in terms of impacts when we chose the pessimistic baseline scenario. These results show that in Vietnam, since the drivers of poverty are also the drivers of climate change impacts on poverty, poverty reduction efforts are a good adaptation policy.

# What messages should we take away from all of these results?

First, the quantitative impacts of climate change on poverty in Vietnam are uncertain, but could be significant, even over the relatively short‐term. It is true that our analysis does not cover all climate change impacts (like those on ecosystem services), yet we still find that more than 1 million people may be pushed into poverty because of climate change impacts in Vietnam.

Second, most of the uncertainty surrounding these impacts comes from development choices made between now and 2030 in Vietnam, and can therefore be actively reduced by implementing the right policies. The quantitative impacts of climate change on poverty are much smaller if socioeconomic trends and policies ensure that development is rapid, inclusive, and climate‐informed, than if extreme poverty persists even without climate change. Development policies supporting high growth, in particular in agriculture, structural changes, expansion of social protection like health insurance, expansion of access to clean water and sanitation, and education, are good adaptation policies that will ensure climate change does not hurt poor people by 2030 in Vietnam.

## **References**

Andres, Luis, Bertha Briceño, Claire Chase, and Juan A. Echenique. 2014. “Sanitation and Externalities: Evidence from Early Childhood Health in Rural India.” _World Bank Policy Research Working Paper_ , no. 6737. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2375456.

Bourguignon, François, Francisco HG Ferreira, and Nora Lustig. 2005. _The Microeconomics of Income Distribution Dynamics in East Asia and Latin America_ . World Bank Publications.

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