Rural poor in India lose 5% of income annually to heat stress, increases climate vulnerability

A new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reveals that climate change is taking a heavy toll on India’s rural poor, who depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods. The report, titled The Unjust Climate, shows that extreme heat and precipitation events reduce the incomes and opportunities of poor rural households while widening the income gap with their better-off counterparts.

Poor rural households lose income

The report estimates that every day of extreme heat, poor rural households in India and 23 other low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) lose 2.4 per cent of their on-farm incomes, 1.1 per cent of the value of the crops they produce and 1.5 per cent of their off-farm income, relative to non-poor households. If the average long-term temperatures were to increase by 1°C, rural poor households will be pushed to depend more on climate-sensitive agriculture and lose off-farm opportunities, leading to a 33 per cent decrease in the off-farm incomes and 53 per cent, according to the authors of the report.

The report also finds that every day of extreme precipitation causes poor households to lose 0.8 per cent of their incomes relative to non-poor households, mostly driven by losses in off-farm incomes. In an average year, poor households lose 5 per cent of their total income due to heat stress relative to better-off households and 4.4 per cent due to floods.

The report warns that extreme weather events push poor rural households to adopt maladaptive coping strategies, such as distress sale of livestock and redirecting expenditures away from their farms. These strategies reduce their investments in agriculture and make them more vulnerable to future climate stressors than non-poor rural households.

The analysis of socioeconomic data from over 100,000 rural households, representing more than 950 million people, across 24 LMICs, forms the basis of the report. The report further incorporates 70 years of georeferenced daily precipitation and temperature data, to gauge the exposure of rural people to various climate stressors, such as floods, heat stress and drought.

Data analyzed on rural households

The report scrutinizes the impact of these climate stressors on people’s incomes, labour and adaptation strategies, taking into account deviations based on wealth, gender and age.

The analysis highlights that floods and heat stress widen the income gap between poor and non-poor households in rural areas by approximately $21 billion a year and $20 billion a year, respectively. These estimates also illustrate the massive challenge extreme weather events pose for global efforts to reduce poverty and inequality. “This challenge will only become more acute as the frequency and intensity of these events increase because of climate change,” the researchers wrote in the report.

The report calls for urgent action to protect the rural poor from the impacts of climate change and to ensure their access to adequate social protection, safety nets and climate-resilient livelihoods.

Encourages investment in climate solutions

The report also encourages more investment in climate-smart agriculture, rural infrastructure and renewable energy. It advocates for greater participation and empowerment of rural women and youth. It emphasizes the need to address the unjust climate, which it identifies as critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and ensuring a fair and prosperous future for all.

However, national climate policies barely make rural people and their climate vulnerabilities visible. The nationally determined contributions (NDC) and national adaptation plans (NAP) of the 24 countries analysed in this report mention poor people less than 1 per cent of the time and refer to farmers in rural communities about 6 per cent of the time.

In 2017-18, the tracked climate finance directed only 7.5 per cent of the total funds towards climate change adaptation. It allocated less than 3 per cent to agriculture, forestry and other land uses or other agriculture-related investments, and only 1.7 per cent, roughly amounting to $10 billion, reached small-scale producers.

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