Impact assessment of climate change on poverty reduction: A global perspective

Climate change and its impacts are the biggest environmental problems the world is facing in recent decades. Climate-sensitive events have already been critical obstacles of poverty reduction and sustainable economic development. Assessing how climate change affects poverty reduction is of great significance to the comprehensive assessment of climate change impacts on social economy and mitigation of its negative impacts. With geo-spatially referenced malnutrition and infant mortality data as a proxy for poverty, focusing on the aspects of agriculture and human well-being that consist of physical health and personal autonomy. This study selects three countries, China, India and Senegal, to investigate the impacts of climate change on poverty reduction. Contrast to previous work when analyze climate changes' impacts most concentrated on coastal urban areas, this paper is focused more on the rural poor areas and conduct a contrastive analysis of different income groups of countries. The correlation analysis results show the same is that the indicators of climate change are in significant correlations with indicators of poverty and that of agriculture and human well-being in China, India and Senegal. However, China performs poorly in terms of personal autonomy, while Senegal performs well, the correlations of forest area percentage (one indicator of climate change) with other variables in Senegal are absolutely opposite to that in China and India. We find the same influence factors have different effects on poverty reduction in these countries, the anti-poverty policies should be made according to local conditions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.