Climate change is a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts.
As the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development states ‘the adverse effects of climate change are already evident, natural disasters are more frequent and more devastating, and developing countries more vulnerable’.
While climate change is a global phenomenon, its negative impacts are more severely felt by poor people and poor countries. They are more vulnerable because of their high dependence on natural resources and their limited capacity to cope with climate variability and extremes.