Table 2 _Number of_ _<u>poor people across environmental risk categories at district‐level</u>_

|Risk<br>category|Air<br>pollution|Tree cover<br>loss|Land<br>degradation|Slope|Rainfall<br>Variability|Temperature<br>Variability|Flood<br>hazards|Drought<br>hazards|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Low|23,393|19,792|18,206|21,302|22,117|21,688|30,318|20,172|
|Medium|24,874|25,046|27,650|21,858|28,054|27,455|21,769|24,281|
|High|25,741|28,967|28,713|30,632|24,106|25,124|21,704|29,349|
|ANOVA|||||||||
|F|1.08|16.99|28.63|22.27|7.09|6.56|19.82|16.94|
|Prob>F|0.3405|0.0000|0.0000|0.0000|0.0009|0.0015|0.0000|0.0000|

Notes: Table shows the number of poor people across the three environmental risks categories as calculated for Figure A.1 and statistics from a one‐way analysis‐of‐variance (ANOVA).

_Source: Authors’ calculation based on data from Brauer et al., 2015, Hansen et al., 2013, Vu et al,. 2014, Harmonized World Soil Database, Climate Research Unit, Bangalore et al., 2016, Winsemius et al., 2015, Lanjouw et al., 2013 and Geographic Information Science and Technology, 2015._

# **4. Commune‐level environmental risks across household groups**

This section explores whether poorer households, as measured by consumption expenditure, live in communes with higher levels of environmental risks based on descriptive statistics and nonparametric analyses.

## **4.1 Methods**

To compare environmental risks across households, the level of environmental risks is calculated for each commune. Whereas the geographical location of communes is known, the household data from the VHLSS is not geo‐coded so that it is not possible to track the exact location of households within communes. Although there can be considerable variation in environmental conditions within communes, environmental risks measured at commune level can measure the wider risk environment the household is exposed too.<sup>7</sup> For each commune, the area‐weighted average of the high‐resolution environmental variables is calculated,<sup>8</sup> as explained in section 2.2. Also the standardized value of each environmental risk is calculated by subtracting from each commune value the mean and dividing by the standard deviation, producing a value distribution with the mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Such normalization produces a scaled version of the original value which allows comparison between the different risk variables.

Descriptive statistics and non‐parametric analyses are conducted. First, the mean risk level is calculated for different household groups in each survey year, differentiating between consumption quintiles, households below the national poverty line, ethnic minorities and female‐headed households (Figures 2 and A.2 for the standardized values and Table A.2 for the absolute values). Households are then divided into consumption percentiles based on the expenditure data from the VHLSS and split into a rural and urban subsamples for each

> 7 Furthermore, as communes are about a fifth of the size of districts, there is likely to be considerably less variation in environmental risk within communes than within districts.

> 8 For the weather and temperature variability, due to the coarse resolution of the data, the value that the centroid of the commune is taken to represent these risks (rather than the area‐weighted average).

9