Climate Change Impacts on Rural Poverty in Low-Elevation Coastal Zones

By Edward B. Barbier. 2015

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper identifies the low-elevation coastal zone populations and developing regions most vulnerable to sea-level rise and other coastal hazards, such as storm surges, coastal erosion, and salt-water intrusion. The focus is on the rural poor in the low-elevation coastal zone, as their economic livelihoods are especially endangered directly by coastal hazards and indirectly through the impacts of climate change on key coastal and near-shore ecosystems. Using geo-spatially referenced malnutrition and infant mortality data for 2000 as a proxy for poverty, this study finds that just 15 developing countries contain over 90 percent of the world’s low-elevation coastal zone rural poor. Low-income countries as a group have the highest incidence of poverty, which declines somewhat for lower-middle-income countries, and then is much lower for upper-middle-income economies. South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa account for most of the world’s low-elevation coastal zone rural poor, and have a high incidence of poverty among their rural low-elevation coastal zone populations. Although fostering growth, especially in coastal areas, may reduce rural poverty in the low-elevation coastal zone, additional policy actions will be required to protect vulnerable communities from disasters, to conserve and restore key coastal and near-shore ecosystems, and to promote key infrastructure investments and coastal community response capability.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Ecology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6719828bcefc5caa181fba339e4d327e2d50bc6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Earth-Surface Processes

  1. Muhammad Azam
  2. Liu Liu

In Ecology

  1. Muhammad Azam
  2. Liu Liu

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

  1. Muhammad Azam
  2. Liu Liu

Citations in the corpus