The 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by UNDP and OPHI, titled “Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards,” reframes poverty for the 21st century. For the first time, it combines climate hazard data with social deprivation, exposing how inequality and environmental risk now reinforce each other.

Beyond Income: The Social Face of Poverty

Poverty is not just about low income. As Amartya Sen reminds us, it is the deprivation of capabilities — the real freedoms people need to lead meaningful lives. The MPI captures this by measuring deficits in health, education, and living conditions.

Across 109 countries, 1.1 billion people live in acute multidimensional poverty. They lack clean fuel, proper housing, nutrition, and education. Most are young and rural. Their poverty is not only material but relational — shaped by their exclusion from networks of power and opportunity.

When Climate Becomes a Social Divide

The 2025 report adds a disturbing layer: exposure to climate hazards. Over 300 million poor people live in areas facing three or more overlapping risks — extreme heat, floods, drought, or air pollution.

Ulrich Beck’s idea of the “risk society” is evident here. Climate change produces universal risks, yet these risks are distributed unequally. The wealthy insulate themselves with technology and insurance; the poor face the full force of nature. Environmental danger becomes a new form of class inequality.

In 2022, climate disasters displaced 32 million people, most of them from already marginalized communities. Their vulnerability is not accidental; it reflects histories of unequal land ownership, colonial legacies, and policy neglect.

India’s Progress and Its Contradictions

India’s poverty rate has dropped from 55% in 2005 to 16% in 2021 — a major achievement. Yet the geography of deprivation reveals deeper fractures. Large parts of India’s poor live in areas simultaneously exposed to floods, heat, and air pollution.

The intersection of caste, class, and environment defines this inequality. Scheduled Castes and Tribes often inhabit ecologically fragile zones, where social discrimination meets climate stress. The result is what sociologists call “intersectional vulnerability.”

A large share of India’s poor also work in the informal sector — without job security or health coverage. One failed monsoon or lost crop can push entire families back into poverty. Economic progress has improved averages, but not resilience.

Kerala: Development Rooted in Society

Kerala offers a rare counter-narrative. On 1 November 2025, it became India’s first state free of extreme poverty. The success lies not in wealth, but in social capital.

For decades, Kerala has invested in literacy, public health, and women’s empowerment. Its poverty eradication programme, launched in 2021, identified each extremely poor family through ground surveys and designed individual micro-plans. This approach reflects Sen’s focus on building capabilities, not just incomes.

Kerala’s achievement shows that when people are treated as agents — not recipients — poverty reduction becomes social transformation. It also underscores the power of community participation and a welfare ethos grounded in dignity.

Overlapping Deprivations: A Structural View

The MPI framework reveals that poverty is multidimensional and systemic. Deficits in nutrition, education, sanitation, and housing overlap because they stem from the same social structures — unequal access, weak institutions, and discrimination.

Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus helps explain why poverty persists. Material deprivation shapes expectations, behavior, and self-perception, making inequality seem “normal.” Climate stress then deepens this disadvantage, locking people into what some scholars call the ecology of inequality.

Policies often target one deprivation at a time — food, education, or housing — but the poor experience them simultaneously. A malnourished child misses school; a sick parent loses income; a flood destroys both home and hope. Poverty, therefore, must be addressed as a web of interlinked conditions, not separate issues.

Climate, Class, and the New Social Order

Beck’s risk society thesis points out that modern risks transcend borders yet follow lines of privilege. The MPI confirms this: two-thirds of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries. Prosperity and poverty coexist within the same national boundaries, even the same cities.

In megacities like Delhi or Lagos, gated communities stand beside informal settlements. When heatwaves hit, the contrast is stark — the air-conditioned versus the exposed. Climate hazards thus produce what sociologist David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” — where the safety of some depends on the vulnerability of others.

The sociological question then becomes: who gets to live safely, and who is left to endure risk?

Reimagining Poverty Reduction

To confront overlapping hardships, policy must move beyond income transfers toward social resilience. Sociology offers several insights:

• Integration over isolation: Welfare schemes must converge — linking health, education, and housing so that deprivations are tackled together.
• Community knowledge: Local participation builds trust and tailors interventions to real needs.
• Universal protection: Social security, healthcare, and risk insurance should be seen as rights, not charity.
• Recognition and dignity: Poverty reduction should expand people’s voice and visibility, not just their consumption.

Sen’s capability approach and Bourdieu’s emphasis on social capital both suggest that empowerment grows when individuals gain control over their environment — physical, economic, and cultural.

Toward a Sociology of Hope

Despite grim statistics, progress is possible. Of 88 countries with comparable MPI data, 76 have reduced poverty at least once in the past decade. Societies can and do change when collective will aligns with social empathy.

Kerala’s success is not an anomaly; it is evidence that social justice works when participation and equity are prioritized. It embodies what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls the “reflexive modernity” — the ability of societies to learn from their own risks and adapt through institutions that value inclusion.

Conclusion: Justice in a Warming World

The 2025 MPI forces us to see poverty not as an economic statistic but as a mirror of humanity’s moral order. The poorest face the fiercest heat, the dirtiest air, and the weakest protections. This is not nature’s doing; it is society’s.

To fight poverty in a warming world is to fight for justice — social, spatial, and environmental. As Sen wrote, “Development is freedom.” That freedom today must include freedom from climate peril.

Kerala’s story gives hope, but it also serves as a reminder: progress is not automatic. It demands solidarity, empathy, and political imagination. The challenge before us is not only to lift people out of poverty but to build a world where no one’s survival depends on another’s comfort.