In March 2024, UN FAO released the Report The Unjust Climate:
Measuring
the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women and youth. This
report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and
middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of
climate change on rural women, youths and people living in poverty. It
analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households
(representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries.
These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of
georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data
enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect
people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labour allocations and
adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age
characteristics.
Numerical highlights of Report
- In an average year, poor households lose 5% of their total income due to heat stress relative to better-off households, and 4.4 %due to floods.
- Floods widen the income gap between poor and non-poor households in rural areas by approximately USD 21 billion a year, and heat stress by more than USD 20 billion a year.
- Long-term temperature rises lead to an increase in poor households’ dependency on climate-sensitive agriculture relative to that of non-poor households. A 1° C increase in average long-term temperatures leads to a 53% increase in the farm incomes of poor households and a 33% decrease in their off-farm incomes, relative to non-poor households.
- Every year, female-headed households experience income losses of 8% due to heat stress, and 3% due to floods, relative to male-headed households.
- Heat stress widens the income gap between female-headed and maleheaded households by USD 37 billion a year, and floods by USD 16 billion a year.
- A 1° C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34 %reduction in the total incomes of female-headed households, relative to those of male-headed households.
- In an average year, households headed by young people see their total incomes increase by 3% due to floods, and by 6% because of heat stress, relative to older households.
- Heat stresses cause young rural households in low- and middle-income countries to increase their annual off-farm income by USD 47 billion relative to that of other households.
- Extreme temperatures push children to increase their weekly working time by 49 minutes relative to prime-aged adults, mostly in the off-farm sector, closely mirroring the increase in the work burden of women.
- Rural people and their climate vulnerabilities are barely visible in national climate policies. In the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs) of the 24 countries analysed in this report, only 6%of the 4 164 climate actions proposed mention women, 2% explicitly mention youth, less than 1%mention poor people and about 6%refer to farmers in rural communities.
- Of the total tracked climate finance in 2017/18, only 7.5% goes towards climate change adaptation; less than 3% to agriculture, forestry and other land uses, or other agriculture-related investments; only 1.7%, amounting to roughly USD 10 billion, reached small-scale producers.
Policy highlights
- Rural people’s multidimensional climate vulnerabilities demand multifaceted policies and programmes that address both the farm and off-farm sources of rural people’s vulnerabilities, and reduce farmers’ reliance on maladaptive coping strategies.
- Linking social protection programmes to advisory services can encourage adaptation and compensate farmers for losses.
- The ability to act on climate-related agricultural advice depends on people’s economic agency and decision-making power.
- Participatory extension methodologies can boost the participation of vulnerable people and result in a greater uptake of improved practices.
- To maximize the positive impact of off-farm opportunities, complementary services are essential. In addition to providing technical and vocational education, it is important to strengthen people’s non-cognitive skills.
- Investing in the collection of disaggregated data is essential to assess the impacts of different climate actions on vulnerable populations.
