A focus on multiple deprivations rather than merely monetary aspects of poverty allows us to understand that many people are poor because they are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized in their society and hence have limited options and capacities to adapt to climatic and other stressors. Such a broadened perspective prevents us from essentializing the poor as one homogeneous entity (not ‘us’, but ‘them’) and acknowledges gradients of poverty and prosperity. As a consequence, when assessing the impacts of climate change on the poor, scholars and practitioners who straddle the fields of development, climate science, and poverty studies recommend an appreciation of the poor as a complex, dynamic, and shifting social entity, for LICs, MICs, and HICs.

Although there is a strong link between poverty and vulnerability, the two concepts are not synonymous. Not all vulnerable people are poor, and those labeled ‘poor’ are poor for different reasons and hence experience climate change differently (Olsson et al. 2014a). Moreover, much of the literature has examined why poor people tend to be particularly exposed to the negative impacts of climate change, for instance by living in flood‐prone areas where rents are cheap. Yet, less attention has been paid to systemic vulnerabilities that make certain individuals and groups of people less capable of preparing for, withstanding, and recovering from stressors and shocks. These are vulnerabilities ‘baked’ into the world we live in, independent of climate change, yet they fundamentally shape adaptive response capacities. The Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC (AR5) explicitly frames vulnerability as one key element of being at risk, in addition to climatic hazards and exposure, not merely a part of it. This conceptualization of vulnerability allows us to identify inequalities that exist in every society as well as uneven local to global development processes that create or exacerbate such inequalities. Together, they result in heightened propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected (IPCC 2014a).

Hence, to understand the structural relations between poverty and vulnerability, more explicit attention needs to be paid to the often concealed dynamics that limit the choices poor people — homeless people in urban centers, marginalized castes, disadvantaged female single‐headed households — have to build adaptive capacities while having to deal with climatic and other stressors, simultaneously or cumulatively. Such convergence of stressors can push their already fragile livelihoods over a critical threshold and into poverty traps. Climatic extreme events such as excessive temperatures, droughts, and hurricanes, and subsequent disasters ranging from heat waves and scorched harvests to flooding, have repeatedly revealed poor people’s inability to cope and recover. However, modest shifts in trends and localized small disasters that may not even be reflected in typical meteorological records (e.g. strong winds that destroy a smallholder’s harvest) can also harm the well‐being of the poorest and most vulnerable populations. In combination with other crises, they trigger or cement downward livelihood trajectories from which it becomes exceedingly difficult to escape.

In this paper, I draw on a diverse and growing literature on climate change and poverty to argue that uneven power relations more so than exposure and sensitivity to climatic hazards make the poor and disadvantaged members of society distinctly more vulnerable than more affluent, privileged, and powerful groups and individuals, across the country spectrum of income levels. I further argue that climatic stressors/climate change as well as climate policies, often entangled with social exclusion and 3