Nearly 80% of the world’s poorest, or about 900 million people, are directly exposed to climate hazards exacerbated by global warming, bearing a “double and deeply unequal burden,” the United Nations warned Friday (October .

“No one is immune to the increasingly frequent and stronger climate change effects like droughts, floods, heat waves, and air pollution, but it’s the poorest among us who are facing the harshest impact,” Haoliang Xu, acting administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, told AFP in a statement.

COP30, the UN climate summit in Brazil in November, “is the moment for world leaders to look at climate action as action against poverty,” he added.

According to an annual study published by the UNDP together with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 1.1 billion people, or about 18 percent of the 6.3 billion in 109 countries analyzed, live in “acute multidimensional” poverty, based on factors like infant mortality and access to housing, sanitation, electricity and education.

Half of those people are minors.

One example of such extreme deprivation cited in the report is the case of Ricardo, a member of the Guarani Indigenous community living outside Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city.

Ricardo, who earns a meager income as a day laborer, shares his small single-family house with 18 other people, including his three children, parents and other extended family.

The house has only one bathroom, a wood- and coal-fired kitchen, and none of the children are in school.

“Their lives reflect the multidimensional realities of poverty,” the report said.

Prioritizing ‘people and the planet’

Two regions particularly affected by such poverty are sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia — and they are also highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

The report highlights the connection between poverty and exposure to four environmental risks: extreme heat, drought, floods, and air pollution.

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“Impoverished households are especially susceptible to climate shocks as many depend on highly vulnerable sectors such as agriculture and informal labor,” the report said.

“When hazards overlap or strike repeatedly, they compound existing deprivations.”

As a result, 887 million people, or nearly 79% of these poor populations, are directly exposed to at least one of these threats, with 608 million people suffering from extreme heat, 577 million affected by pollution, 465 million by floods, and 207 million by drought.

Roughly 651 million are exposed to at least two of the risks, 309 million to three or four risks, and 11 million poor people have already experienced all four in a single year.

“Concurrent poverty and climate hazards are clearly a global issue,” the report said.

And the increase in extreme weather events threatens development progress.

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While South Asia has made progress in fighting poverty, 99.1 percent of its poor population exposed to at least one climate hazard.

The region “must once again chart a new path forward, one that balances determined poverty reduction with innovative climate action,” the report says.

With Earth’s surface rapidly getting warmer, the situation is likely to worsen further and experts warn that today’s poorest countries will be hardest hit by rising temperatures.

“Responding to overlapping risks requires prioritizing both people and the planet, and above all, moving from recognition to rapid action,” the report said.

Published – October 17, 2025 07:32 pm IST

Seven years before wildfires tore through opposite ends of the Los Angeles area, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California’s Sonoma County jumped a six-lane freeway and decimated Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park subdivision, a suburban enclave similar to Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

The fire destroyed about 5,000 homes in Santa Rosa and the surrounding area in October 2017, with about 1,500 of those in Coffey Park, making it California’s costliest wildfire disaster at the time. Within three years, 80% of Coffey Park’s destroyed homes were fully rebuilt and occupied, according to local officials.

The journey was long, uncertain and filled with detours, according to interviews with Coffey Park residents who rebuilt and local government officials. Debris removal was a lengthy, cumbersome process; there was contractor fraud, leading to criminal convictions; the minutiae of government approvals at every step caused frustration.

But the experiences of those who rebuilt in Coffey Park and Santa Rosa also showed the power of collective action by residents, and local government success streamlining construction, which offer a template for the Los Angeles-area communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, where more than 16,000 homes and other structures were destroyed by this month’s fires that also killed 28 people.

“Band together and have a group that you go through it with,” said Jeff Okrepkie, who started a nonprofit rebuilding group for Coffey Park, finished his rebuild in early 2020 and later became a Santa Rosa city council member. “It’s always easier to get your questions answered when you’re asking for 100 people, or 500 people.”

‘Not much you can do’

David Kovalevski wants to rebuild his century-old Altadena craftsman house that burned in the Eaton Fire northeast of Los Angeles, but the task looks daunting. “When can we even start?” he said. “It looks like a war zone.”

He is trying to understand what insurance will pay, and how that will compare to new, higher prices as thousands of homeowners in his area try to rebuild at the same time. “How will they even manage in a reasonable timeframe to rebuild so many houses at the same time?” Damian Clopton had many of the same questions in the weeks after he fled his burning Coffey Park home in October 2017 with his wife, Ashley Osbun, four cats and a laptop.

He remembered the “shell shock,” waking up each morning in an unfamiliar house, only to realize a few seconds later his predicament. “Everything just sucks in the beginning,” Clopton said. “You really want to move on and there’s not much you can do.”

That was because, like in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, residents were largely kept out as emergency crews sent cadaver dogs to search for missing people and Hazmat crews removed toxic waste.

Then came debris removal, which started about a month after the fire and took two-and-a-half months to complete. In Sonoma County in 2017, residents could choose a FEMA-contracted debris removal program or hire a private contractor, which was more expensive and required certifications for disposing of hazardous material.

“People think they’re just going to be able to get a dump truck and a backhoe, build their house and move on,” said Steve Rahmn, a Coffey Park resident who completed his rebuild in 2020. “Government’s got its due process.”

The Santa Rosa FEMA program offered the easiest path but suffered from bureaucratic bungles, such as FEMA’s policy of paying contractors based on the weight of debris they carried off site. Crews eager for maximum weight left sunken lots, and the state ultimately had to create a new program to replace homeowners’ missing dirt.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services this month announced similar debris removal options for private properties in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires. First, Environmental Protection Agency crews must remove hazardous waste, including electric-vehicle batteries, which began earlier this month. Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella has said debris removal could take six months to a year.

U.S. Congressman Mike Thompson, whose district includes Santa Rosa, said he has developed what he calls a “disaster booklet” to impart lessons to representatives from areas affected by wildfires. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” he said, citing pre-approval of building plans as a model for faster reconstruction.

After crews finished debris removal in Santa Rosa, the neighborhood was a blank canvas, meaning residents had to get property lines surveyed again. Potentially every homeowner had to hire a surveyor in order to start drawing up plans for new homes.

That’s where the collective action began. Though scattered around the area and the country, residents kept in touch on social media, social meetings like “Wine Wednesdays” and an area newsletter. Many started meeting in the first few weeks at a local junior college and a performing arts center, said Okrepkie, and the numbers built as the weeks went by.

City planning officials attended the meetings and started making policies directly resulting from those discussions, said Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s director of planning and economic development.

After hearing surveying concerns, city officials helped connect residents with local surveyors to speed up the process, Osburn said.

Discussions from those meetings also led to the city creating a “resilient” zone for fire-damaged areas, with reduced planning and design requirements.

“Anything that would be an impediment from a time standpoint, or a cost standpoint, we analyzed,” Osburn said.

In the wake of the Los Angeles-area fires, Newsom suspended certain state environmental reviews in the fire-affected areas, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an order creating a new permitting center to be staffed seven days a week in the fire-affected areas.

In Santa Rosa, local builders also sped up the recovery process by drawing up a handful of home designs that were pre-approved by local officials. This allowed many residents to choose from a menu of options and quickly build a house. Some homeowners, like Carol McHale, were not so lucky. She and her partner lost more than $100,000 of their personal savings after a builder asked for money upfront but never completed their rebuild. He was among several contractors who were convicted of fraud in the years after the fire.

McHale started over with another contractor, having to revisit every excruciating decision: Vinyl or hardwood floors, quartz or granite for kitchen counters, what paint color inside?

“We were making $10,000 decisions every day,” McHale said. “Even years later, it makes my stomach hurt.” But out of that painful experience, she also found hope: She and her partner, Erin Murphy, re-committed to their relationship, and will soon celebrate their 25th anniversary.

“People say ‘I don’t know how you did it,'” she said. “You do one day; you do the next one.”

‘I can control this’

The rebuilding process was often an emotional roller coaster, residents said.

Clopton chose to be his own general contractor, making substantial changes to the original design. He still hasn’t fully finished.

“Yes, they’ve gone out of their way to get rid of regulations, at the same time that they pile on other regulations,” he said. “This is a slog.”

Okrepkie said that after debris removal was complete, heavy rains in early 2018 delayed all construction, just as he was hoping to break ground. Work progressed, though, and by late 2019 the drywall was complete on his new home.

“All of a sudden you’re like, ‘This is the exact dimension of the living room I’m going to watch the Super Bowl in,” he recalled. “You see all the bedrooms upstairs and you say ‘I wonder which one my son is going to want?'”

For him, there was a satisfaction that came with rebuilding in the wake of a fire, a sense that he once again had control.

“I couldn’t control losing my house, or moving away, but I can control this,” he said. “I can control what my countertops look like. I think there’s a healthy aspect to that.”

A view of the site of a landslide in Yambali village, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, May 27, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A devastating landslide struck several remote villages in the mountainous Enga province in Papua New Guinea late last week.

While it is too early for official confirmation, estimates place the death toll between 690 and 2,000 people, with thousands more missing. That only a few bodies have been recovered serves as a tragic reminder of the destructive power of these events.

The ongoing search and rescue operations have proven challenging. As often with landslides, secondary slides and rock falls are hampering efforts in the search zone. There’s also a lack of access to heavy digging machinery, and roads need to be cleared or repaired for assistance and equipment to arrive.

Even more critically, it is difficult to locate potential survivors, as landslides carry away buildings and their occupants in an unpredictable manner. What causes these devastating events and why are they so sudden and unpredictable?

What causes landslides?

Landslides happen when the pull from gravity exceeds the strength of the geomaterial forming the slope of a hill or mountain. Geomaterials can be as varied as rocks, sand, silt and clays.

Then, part of this slope starts sliding downhill. Depending on where the slope fails, the material sliding down can be just a few cubic metres or a few million cubic metres in volume.

Why do slopes fail? Most natural landslides are triggered by earthquakes or rainfall, or a combination of both.

Earthquakes shake the ground, stress it and weaken it over time. Rainwater can seep through the ground and soak it – the ground is often porous like a sponge – and add weight to the slope. This is why PNG is so prone to landslides, as it sits on an active fault and is subjected to heavy rainfalls.

Another adverse effect of water is erosion: the constant action of waves undercuts coastal slopes, causing them to fail. Groundwater can also dissolve rocks within slopes.

Humans can (and do) cause landslides in several ways, too. For example, deforestation has a negative impact on slope stability, as tree roots naturally reinforce the ground and drain water out. Also, mine blasts produce small earthquake-like ground vibrations that shake slopes nearby.

Why can’t we predict landslides?

It’s very difficult to predict and mitigate landslide risk effectively. The Enga landslide and the thousands of deadly and costly landslides occurring every year worldwide suggest so. Even in Australia – the flattest continent in the world – home insurance policies don’t tend to cover landslide risk for a simple reason: this risk is difficult to estimate.

So what would it take to warn people of a coming landslide? You would need a prediction for earthquakes and rainfall, in addition to a perfect knowledge of the slope-forming geomaterial.

Under our feet, geomaterials may include multiple, entangled layers of various kinds of rocks and particulate materials, such as sand, silt and clays. Their strength varies from a factor of one to 1,000, and their spatial distribution dictates where the slope is likely to fail.

To accurately assess the stability of the slope, a three-dimensional mapping of these materials and their strengths is needed. No sensor can provide this information, so geologists and geotechnical engineers must deal with partial information obtained at a few selected locations and extrapolate this data to the rest of the slope.

The weakest link of the chain – such as an existing fracture in a rock mass – is easily missed. This is an inevitable source of uncertainty when trying to predict how much material might slip.

We do know that the larger the volume of a landslide, the farther its runout distance. But it’s hard to gauge the exact size of a landslide, making predictions of runout distances and safe zones uncertain.

The question of “when will a landslide will occur” is also uncertain. Mechanical analysis enables us to estimate the vulnerability of a slope in a particular scenario, including earthquake magnitude and distribution of groundwater. But predicting if and when these triggers will happen is as “easy” as predicting the weather and seismic activity – a difficult task.

Unfortunately, all the money in the world can’t buy accurate landslide predictions – especially in remote parts of the world.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.