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Chenla lives in Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, with her parents and three siblings. The family of six all live in the same small boat as they cannot afford a house and rely on selling fish they catch in the lake as their main income. Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Asia and one of the richest fishing grounds in the world, but this is now under threat due to the impact of climate change. Fish stocks have rapidly depleted, pushing thousands of families who rely on the lake for their livelihoods into poverty. Chenla describes conditions as “difficult” living with a large family in such a small space, with just a plam leaf roof to provide them with some shelter from the sun. They have a small plastic tent for when it rains, but it doesn’t stop the water coming in. The family earn around £3.50 per day from selling the fish they catch in the lake, which only covers rice and gasoline for the boat, so there is no money for anything else. When there are storms, they can’t go out and fish which means they don’t earn anything at all. Her father Sambath (66) has lived on the lake since 1979 and noticed lots of changes in the environment, the sun getting hotter, the rain patterns changing and illegal fishing which he believes have impacted the numbers of fish. Sambath says we have created a lot of the problems ourselves, through overfishing, cutting down the forests and destroying the resources the lake has to offer. He says he used to go out on the lake with his net to catch fish, sometimes catching fish weighing between 3-5 kilos. But now this has all changed, with less fish in the lake, leaving him struggling to feed his family. He says that people who live around the lake have been forced into poverty and now cannot afford to feed their families either. Sambath’s main worry is how he is going to support his children, that’s why he takes them fishing with him everyday so they can learn a skill to try and earn a living. But despite her families circumstances Chenla wants to study hard and get a job to support her parents and siblings, such as in construction or working in a factory. Chenla “Every day I help my father set out the gillnet (fishing nets).” “It is very difficult. The water comes through all over the boat, and we don’t have proper a plastic tent.” “I have lived here for five or six years now, and we don’t have a house to live in. We only have that small boat for all of my family..” “We earn about 20,000 – 30,000 riels to pay for rice and gasoline [for the boat]."  "We never have any money to spend on anything else other than rice and gasoline. And sometimes, there are winds and storms, so we can’t go fishing and get nothing.” Sambath “I’ve been living here since 1979.  Everyday i go fishing, scatter the nets, and set out gillnets.” “There have been lots of changes.  There are changes such as; the heat from the sun getting hotter. The off-season rain​ and water. Many changes to natural resources.” "People who live on the river can’t make a living anymore. There’s only death and starvation.   Because we lost all the fish, the natural resources, including trees, and forests that have been cut down and we have nothing left.” Lim Sokchanlina / Save the Children

Getting granular with data: New estimates of the dual impacts of poverty and climate risk

31 Oct 2022 Global

Blog by Oliver Fiala

Senior Research Advisor, Save the Children UK

To better understand how many children across the world are affected by this dual poverty and climate risk, we conducted new data analysis, published in our new report Generation Hope. Our analysis found that 774 million children globally – one out of every three children – both live in poverty and are profoundly impacted by the climate crisis.

Chenla, 15, stands in the water for a portrait near her boat house, Kompong Thom province, Cambodia.

We stand side by side with children in the world's toughest places.

Children or poor families are the most affected negatively from climate change because they don’t have the ability to handle the huge dangers.” This insight was shared by a 14-year-old boy from Gaza as part of Save the Children’s biggest-ever global consultation with children, engaging over 54,000 children from 41 countries on the topics of climate change and inequality.

To better understand how many children across the world are affected by this dual poverty and climate risk, we conducted new data analysis, published in our new report Generation Hope. Our analysis found that 774 million children globally – one out of every three children – both live in poverty and are profoundly impacted by the climate crisis. And while the majority of this burden falls on poorer countries (with the vast majority living in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa), more than 100 million children live in richer countries, some in the most prosperous countries in the world.

Understanding how different risks overlap and intersect

The vast majority of global databases and analyses of development and child rights data focus on one particular problem or outcome: extreme poverty, out-of-school children, mental health, and so on. But we live in times of overlapping crises – climate change, conflict, COVID-19, cost of living. Rather than looking at issues in isolation, we should therefore look for data which help us to understand the interplay between the different factors and approach problems more holistically.

Understanding the magnitude of the problem

Our analysis considers the question of how many children are both living in poverty and face extreme climate risks. First, we analysed multidimensional child poverty globally, estimating the proportion of children severely deprived of good healthcare, nutrition, education, housing, water or sanitation. We drew on a wide range of available datasets and approaches to cover as much of the global population of children as possible (our methodological note describes this in much more detail). We estimate that 954 million children – more than 1 out of 4 children globally – are living in poverty.

Second, we wanted to understand how many children are impacted by extreme climate events, such as heatwaves, cyclones, flooding, water scarcity, wildfires or crop failure. With support of the BCLIMATE group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, we used global climate models to estimate that more than 1.8 billion childrenfour out of five – experience at least one extreme climate event per year.

These numbers are hugely concerning in their own right: regularly experiencing the manifestations of the climate crisis or growing up in poverty will have profound impacts on children’s futures, their mental and physical health, and their broader well-being. But even more worrying is the sheer magnitude of the double burden: 774 million children globally live in poverty and at the same time are experiencing at least one extreme climate event per year. Most of those children live in low- (197 million) and lower-middle income countries (456 million), but children in richer countries are affected by this double burden as well: 93 million children live in upper middle-income countries and 28 million in the world’s most affluent countries.

Getting granular

We derived our analysis from subnational data for the first time, digging beneath the surface of national averages in an attempt to get a more accurate picture of the risks children are facing. This allowed us to avoid the problem of national averages masking significant inequalities within countries. If we’d only used national averages of poverty or climate risk rates, we would not know if poor regions within a country are also those most at risk of extreme climate events. Subnational level data allowed us to build a much more accurate picture, and was available for most countries (usually for the first administrative level down, such as states or provinces), effectively dividing up the world into more than 2,000 regions.

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Ayşe Nur Gençalp / Save the Children Türkiye

Shades of blue indicate a high proportion of children living in multidimensional poverty (over a third). There are still children who experience high climate risk in many of these countries, but the proportion is less than a third. Shades of red show that climate risks are more prevalent than poverty. Dark purple indicates where both poverty and high climate risk are highly prevalent.

Conducting more granular analysis not only offers methodological advantages, but also helps provide more relevant information for national policy makers and advocates. It allows us to compare different subnational regions within a country, with potentially important implications for policy design, such as the design of shock-responsive social protection systems or determining where investments in climate adaptation, resilience and anticipatory action are needed most. We are planning to make most of this data available in the near future on an upgraded version of GRID, Save the Children’s Child Inequality Tracker, in addition to other data on overlapping risks faced by children across the globe, including conflict.

Mind the gap

This analysis is another reminder why it is so important to move beyond national averages and to invest in disaggregated data, both by different subnational units as well as by other group-based inequalities (such as gender, disability, and socio-economic status). Doing this effectively will depend on more frequent and comparable household surveys (a major challenge during COVID-19) as well as better disaggregation of administrative data. Despite progress in recent years, many global databases still focus largely on national level averages and disaggregated data is still often old or not available (especially in poorer countries and fragile contexts).

Often, we get the most valuable insights when we can bring different datasets together. This requires data to be harmonised to agreed standards so that data users can easily combine and compare it, but this often isn’t done, especially with subnational datasets. Governments, data scientists and researchers must push to expand the quality and use of more granular, combined datasets. Success would unlock considerable insights for better policies and programmes with significant potential to advance children’s rights.

Did you find this research insightful? Go and take a look at our new report for more information on the dual impact of the climate crisis and poverty. 

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