Global MPI 2025 Seminar – Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards

The global MPI is an internationally comparable index of multidimensional poverty which covers over 100 countries in developing regions. It complements traditional monetary poverty measures by capturing the acute deprivations in health, education, and living standards that a person faces simultaneously. The 2025 report, Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate, overlays data on multidimensional poverty and climate hazards for the first time. In this seminar, OPHI Director Sabina Alkire presented the key findings of the breadth and depth of poverty around the world as well as data on poverty trends. OPHI Research and Policy Officer Lhachi Selden then presented the thematic analysis on the links between poverty and climate hazards. This year’s report overlays multidimensional poverty data with data on four climate hazards: high heat, drought, floods and air pollution. It finds that nearly 8 in 10 people living in multidimensional poverty – 887 million out of 1.1 billion globally – are exposed to at least one of the four climate hazards. The analysis demonstrates that applying a poverty lens in environmental analysis and vice versa will become increasingly important to help understand where people are suffering the most, where the planet is under the greatest strain, and where these crises overlap.