studies have also shown flood duration to play an important role in flood impacts (Parker et al., 1987; FEMA, 2005; Dang et al., 2010), especially for indirect losses (Lekuthai and Vongvisessomjai, 2001) flood‐related health issues (Dang et al., 2010); and flood level rise rate is especially important in terms of mortality (Jonkman et al., 2009). More research is required to examine how these could impact on poverty. Future research may also expand to other hazards, as has been done for extreme temperatures (Park et al., 2015).

Similarly, households that are highly vulnerable to droughts (e.g. with assets strongly relying on available water) may already experience problems during a one‐month drought condition, although others may only be exposed if the drought lasts three months or more. To assess the robustness of the drought indicator applied, we test our results using a one‐month and six‐month threshold. Obviously, more people are exposed with a one‐month threshold than with a six‐month threshold. For the aggregated PEB results (Supp. Figure 6), we can only find a significant number of exposed households in six countries using a six‐month drought threshold with a return period of 10 years; this increases to up to 50 countries, when considering one‐month droughts as threshold with a 100 year return period. Notably, median PEB values are above zero for the 100 year return‐period drought, and decreases toward and below zero for lower return periods (10 years) droughts and higher drought thresholds.

This suggests that the small sample sizes make it very hard to find a robust exposure bias pattern in many countries. Nonetheless, we found consistent results on the sign of the PEB for sub‐Saharan Africa (Nigeria, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, and Benin (not significant for a one‐ month threshold)), Southeast Asia (Philippines, Indonesia (not significant for a six‐month threshold)) and Colombia (when comparing the one‐, three‐ and six‐month threshold results under the 100‐year return period). Other countries showed mixed results over the different threshold values and therefore results over these countries should be treated with a lower confidence.

# **6. Conclusions**

In this paper, we investigated at the country level whether poor and non‐poor people are disproportionally exposed to current floods and droughts and how this exposure changes in a changing climate. To this end, we combine global drought and flood hazard and household survey data in 52 countries. The general conclusion is that across countries, poor people are over‐exposed to droughts and urban floods. But the situation differs strongly across countries, within countries and based on the type of hazard – for instance, for floods at the national level, we find little evidence of an over‐ exposure or under‐exposure of poor people.

Geographically, the countries where the strongest positive poverty exposure bias (PEB) is found, are concentrated in Africa for both perils. For floods, the countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa as well as the horn of Africa and Egypt experience the highest positive PEB. For droughts, poor people are more exposed in almost all countries in Africa, and also South‐East Asia shows this signal.

We find that in urban areas, poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods compared to the average, while such a signal is not found for rural households. This is particularly noticeable in Africa, with the exception of several western African countries. In some countries, the absence of a positive PEB at national level may be due to the fact that the gap in wealth between cities and rural areas is 21