Climate Risk and Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa

The Middle East and North Africa faces significant climate challenges, such as increasing temperatures, heightened flood risks, frequent droughts, and growing air pollution issues. These challenges are compounded by the large proportion of the population living below the poverty line in some countries in the region. Indeed, people living in poverty are more exposed to poor air quality and natural disasters as they disproportionately tend to live in hazard-prone areas. They are also more vulnerable as they may have scarcer resources to cope with shocks. This paper combines remote sensing, geospatial data, and household surveys to provide high-resolution assessments of the exposure and vulnerability of the region’s population and poor people to four types of climate shocks. With the data available, the paper estimates that almost the entirety of the extreme poor population is exposed to at least one climate shock. The region hosts climate-poverty hot spots in the Republic of Yemen and Morocco, where adaptation to climate change will be crucial to end poverty. The resulting high-resolution estimates of exposure and vulnerability can inform the targeting of climate adaptation measures.