possible and sustain this divide between wealth and destitution, by means of willful omission. Poverty becomes subject to othering (‘they’, not ‘us’) while the benefits that accrue to ‘us’ at ‘their’ expense become silenced. As shown in the example of homeless people in Seattle and France, it is not only about assets (lacking a place to sleep). It is about relational practices (‘they’ scare/embarrass ‘us’) and social policies that put disadvantaged populations even further at risk of becoming harmed. It is about undermining the poor’s already slim set of adaptive responses to stressors, including cold spells, flooding from sea level rise, and processes of urban disinvestment and hardened institutions.

Concerted efforts to address factors that adequately capture poor people’s constrained response capacities and limits to adaptation, independent of where they live, ought to include explicit attention to this growing divide between the privileged and the marginalized. This means more emphasis on structural drivers of poverty that go beyond an analysis of assets and shocks, focusing on mechanisms of deprivation, exclusion, and disenfranchisement, such as exploitative labor regimes, repressive social and housing policies, and dynamics of criminalization. Some mainstream poverty frameworks do acknowledge the concept of exclusion, often folded under ‘asset dynamics’. Yet, such consideration may only apply in the context of shocks to individuals or a community that may lead to forgone income or missed opportunities. Capturing exclusion under social capital is insufficient to convey the systematic erosion of capabilities through exclusionary social policies and other harmful institutional arrangements. I propose social exclusion as one distinct category as part of an ‘arch of structural constraints’ that shapes multidimensional vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities (see Section 5, Figure 9).

So far, it seems that the predominant focus on climate change impacts on the poor in poor countries has successfully diverted attention from exclusionary and failed social policies in more affluent nations. This, in turn, has prevented a critical inquiry of unequal power relations that underlie differences in adaptive capacities between the poor and the non‐poor. Even in countries where multiple facets of poverty are very much present in daily discourses and national poverty‐reduction strategies, for instance in India, relational dynamics that produce ‘the poor’ and their vulnerabilities remain obscured (see an insightful exception in Vignette 2 below). Yet, the time is ripe to fill this gap by expanding our existing methodological tool sets, observations, and measurements to better capture such cross‐scalar mechanisms that serve the privileged while further marginalizing the already disadvantaged.

To date, a lack of substantive case studies does not allow for a systematic assessment of these mechanisms across economic and cultural contexts. Hence, standardized metrics across countries and societies are currently beyond reach. At the same time, such comparable metrics may not be needed as long as the analytical focus of climate change and poverty studies encompasses appreciation of entrenched and emerging relational drivers of poverty and solid evidence is collected through in‐depth, context‐specific inquiries. Below are two initial case studies that serve as a starting point for such a relational analysis. Vignette 1 explores differential merit in protecting socially vulnerable versus affluent people and regions against sea level rise in the United States. Vignette 2 describes how the inclusion of marginalized farmers into exploitative dependency relationships with more affluent and powerful social actors in rural India exacerbates poverty and vulnerability to climatic stressors among the former while further enriching the latter.

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