The rising temperatures across the world due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions are expected to deliver 100 million people into extreme poverty, the World Bank warns. A new report suggests that efforts to fight climate change and programmes to curb poverty should work together to save at-risk people from the impact of growing emissions.

The study from the World Bank highlights the threat of global warming to food security. To date, some poor countries have already experienced crop failures, higher food prices, natural disasters and spread of waterborne diseases due to climate change.

These events are pushing people to poverty, according to the study. The latest estimate from the World Bank shows that there are 702 million people experiencing extreme poverty today.

This current number of people covers 9.6 per cent of the world’s population. The figure led the bank to suggest that world leaders should consider incorporating strategies to work against poverty on their plans to fight climate change.

“The policies, the investments, the financing, all of that should be integrated. Otherwise, we’re just less efficient,” said co-author Stéphane Hallegatte, a senior economist at the World Bank’s climate change group. “We really want to reduce poverty before people get affected by even bigger climate impacts. It’s easier to get people out of extreme poverty now rather than doing it later.”

The study also highlights that it is important that future programmes against climate change should not promote “new vulnerabilities” that may negatively affect people. The programmes should consider future climate conditions for development policies, it added.

“When we [build] infrastructure, for instance, [we need] to make sure it’s in a safe place today but also in a safe place with sea level rise and the change in rainfall and so on,” the Guardian quoted Hallegatte.

If governments fail to provide proper planning, the report warns that decades of progress in supporting vulnerable people living in poverty could be undone by efforts to fight climate change. The World Bank predicts that environmental taxes to reduce emissions would potentially increase the cost of fuel and food, which may greatly affect poor people.

However, the report indicates that “these same policies can be designed to protect, and even benefit, poor people – for instance, by using fiscal resources from environmental taxes to improve social protection.”

Hallegatte believes that world leaders would take urgent actions against climate change and will improve efforts to fight poverty. In December, world leaders are expected to discuss global climate actions at the Paris Climate Summit where some nation leaders hope to promote benefits for the most vulnerable people across the world, including those in Pacific Island countries.

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