# **<mark>Introduction</mark>**

Since the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2007), the understanding of the linkages between climate change, poverty, and vulnerability has been growing substantially. There is no doubt that the poorest people are already and will continue to be most severely impacted by climatic changes, including shifting trends as well as more frequent and more severe extreme events. Yet, new insights with respect to the dynamics and distribution of poverty point to the need to better comprehend where the poor and poorest are, how they are poor, and why their poverty constrains their abilities to cope with and adapt to occurring and predicted changes. The simplistic assumption that poor people live predominantly in poor countries and are vulnerable because they lack financial resources and other key assets to prepare and respond no longer withstands empirical context‐specific evidence to the contrary.

The time is ripe to shift our lens from poor countries to poor people, independent of where they live. Lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy in the United States as well as the European heat waves reveal significant pockets of poverty and inequality in high‐income countries (HICs) that make successful adaptation among the poor there more and more a question of political priority, in addition to the more familiar challenges of adaptation deficits or gaps in the global South. Poverty pockets and increasing inequality also characterize middle‐income countries (MICs), for instance China, Brazil, and South Africa. In fact, the largest share of poor people – more than one billion – living under $1.25/day and a second billion between $1.25 and $2/day to date exists in MICs, compared to an additional 320 million and 170 million in low‐income countries (LICs), respectively (Sumner 2012).

Moreover, it is now well understood that poverty is not limited to income poverty; it also includes deprivations in basic services such as health, education, and standard of living, hunger, illiteracy, social exclusion, loss of sense of belonging and identity, and disempowerment, often reflected in truncated core capabilities to flourish and protect oneself and others. Poverty encompassing multiple deprivations is known as multidimensional poverty (UNDP, 1990) and captured in the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) (UNDP, 2010). In 2014, this index, encompassing 108 developing countries (31 LICs, 67 MICs, and 10 HICs) corresponding to 78% of the world’s populations, reported 1.6 billion people as multidimensional poor (Alkire et al. 2014). This means poor in dimensions of education, health, and living standards. This assessment, however, does not include China and Argentina, and none of the >30 high‐income OECD countries, hence missing poverty in countries with significant affluence. Even so, this number is higher than the current 1.2 billion of people living on <$1.25/day, understood as extreme poor (World Bank 2014a). The MPI also captures intensity of poverty as degree of deprivation (e.g. not having electricity, not having improved sanitation), as well as destitution as an extreme expression of poverty. In 2014, roughly half of all multidimensionally poor people fell into this category of destitution. Based on 2005/06 data, close to 350 million destitute people live in India (a lower MIC) alone or 28.5% of the country’s total population (Alkire et al. 2014). In 2010, calculated from the same data set, India’s poorest eight largest states together shared more people in MPI than the 26 poorest countries in Africa together (ibid). The challenges for fair and timely adaptation to climatic changes are enormous.

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