Abstract Climate change poses a growing threat to poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa. Yet the level of welfare or wellbeing at which climate shocks can be resisted, or no longer have an impact on wellbeing status, is often underestimated. This article introduces a special issue of the IDS Bulletin, synthesising multi-country qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods evidence from these two regions. It shows that climate resilience is closely linked to the same capacities that enable sustained escapes from poverty. While households in and near poverty employ diverse forms of coping, limited assets and weak institutional support limit their ability to maintain wellbeing over time. The article accordingly highlights the need for integrated, multisectoral approaches combining social protection, livelihood support, and skills development to strengthen climate resilience alongside poverty reduction.
Keywords climate resilience, poverty reduction, East Africa, Southern Africa, mixed methods, multisectoral action.
East and Southern Africa face a disproportionately high burden from climate change. As many as 28 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change are located in these two regions (ND-GAIN 2025). This vulnerability stems in part from high exposure to climate-induced hazards such as prolonged droughts, recurrent flooding, and increasingly intense tropical cyclones, which exert pressures on already fragile social systems, economic systems, and ecosystems. The economies of these two regions rely strongly on the agriculture sector, where rain-fed agriculture accounts for over 90 per cent of cultivated land in many countries (Odongo et al. 2022; WFP 2021). In many parts of the region, successive failed harvests amid recurrent climate-related disasters have devastated household food supplies and income sources (OCHA 2026), intensifying chronic poverty (Diwakar and Lacroix 2021).
Poverty reduction in turn is a major policy priority in countries in these two regions, which are home to some of the countries with the highest poverty rates globally (World Bank 2024a). Across these countries, poor and marginalised populations face the greatest exposure and the least capacity to adapt to climatic shocks (Hallegatte et al. 2016). Achieving resilience to the damaging effects of climate change is an essential aspect of poverty reduction, as climate-related disasters feature more and more prominently as determinants of poverty dynamics.
Yet, as the articles in this IDS Bulletin suggest, the capacity to build and sustain resilience to frequent climate-related disasters (and other shocks or crises) is itself shaped by existing levels of welfare, with those at relatively higher levels of welfare better able to absorb the impacts of climate-related disasters and sustain their welfare over time. In other words, the durability and transformative potential of resilience processes are in great part conditioned by material circumstances. While even highly marginalised populations demonstrate resilience capacities, having navigated repeated adversity amid climate change, they might find this process truncated. Poor and highly vulnerable households with low adaptive capacity may have no choice but to resort to negative coping responses or ‘maladaptive’ practices such as withdrawing children from school to support informal labour, reducing meals, or selling sex for small returns. Harvesting wild products or engaging in petty trading are other widespread strategies which may in some contexts or under certain circumstances have negative aspects. These coping mechanisms deepen people’s vulnerability and may entrench chronic poverty.
There is a body of research on climate change and poverty (e.g. Abeygunawardena et al. 2010; Eriksen et al. 2007), including a past IDS Bulletin on the topic that centres on the need to ensure that adaptation programming takes into account the differentiated nature of poverty. The relationship between climate change and poverty in this literature is largely recognised to be bidirectional and mutually reinforcing. Even so, links between poverty reduction and climate resilience remain currently under-researched and with limited policy articulation. This is seen, for example, through limitations in terms of regional evidence from Africa, including mixed-methods insights on people-centred recovery trajectories, and an understanding of pathways through which climate resilience can drive poverty reduction and vice versa. There is also an absence of integrated policies. This IDS Bulletin highlights the mechanisms through which climate change drives negative poverty dynamics, examines the role of adaptation and instruments such as social protection in mitigating these negative impacts, and identifies policy pathways for building long-term resilience to both poverty and climate change. It examines how climate-resilient strategies by households up to community and institutional levels have concurrently supported poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa.
While climate resilience and poverty reduction discourses often operate separately, this IDS Bulletin identifies bidirectional relationships and synergies. This goes beyond outlining problems to highlight ways in which households, communities, institutions, and policymaking have helped drive innovations that concurrently reduce poverty while also building climate resilience. It brings together multidisciplinary quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods evidence deriving from multiple countries in East and Southern Africa. In doing so, it builds a cross-country evidence base in a set of high-poverty countries. Efforts to build climate resilience certainly exist, even at low levels of coping with climate change impacts, given the knowledge and capacities that people, including vulnerable populations, may have in disaster-prone contexts. At the same time, strengthening climate resilience may still be particularly challenging given their conditions of high vulnerability, where limited assets or weak institutional support can affect their ability to cope with crises over time without reducing their welfare.
The research topics identified in this IDS Bulletin raise an important question for policymaking or programme design: which policies, programmes, and investments will most effectively reduce the climate resilience threshold – i.e. the threshold at which people in and near poverty are able to be resilient to climate change effects – in different contexts? The evidence presented in this set of articles integrates consideration of different types of instruments (social protection, vocational training, and livelihood systems support) and considers the extent to which these are fit-for-purpose and politically feasible to address structural issues. This analysis provides a counterbalance to the more usual single-sector technocratic research. By consolidating this evidence, this IDS Bulletin aims to inform national and international policymakers, practitioners, and researchers seeking to design effective, context-specific strategies that safeguard livelihoods in an era of increasing climate uncertainty.
This IDS Bulletin builds on key messages from a regional conference held in May 2025 on Poverty Reduction and Climate Resilience organised by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) (with its partners represented institutionally in this collaboration by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI), the Centre for Economic and Social Research (CESOR), and the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR)), the Government of Zambia’s Ministry of Community Development and Social Services, and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. The articles reflect on the relationship between climate resilience and poverty reduction through a set of case studies that identify context-specific approaches that support these twin goals simultaneously or in sequence.
CPAN’s poverty tripod focuses on tackling chronic poverty, preventing impoverishment, and sustaining poverty escapes (Shepherd et al. 2014). In the rest of this article we return conceptually to this tripod, integrating it with an emphasis on resilience capacities to withstand the effects of climate change while advancing poverty reduction. It examines key themes that emerge from integrating poverty dynamics with climate resilience, structured around building absorptive capacities through multiple reinforcing interventions (i.e. layered interventions) for households already in poverty, strengthening anticipatory and adaptive capacities for supporting sustained escapes over impoverishment, and promoting transformative action by centring inclusion in the climate resilience agenda.
Section 2 discusses entry points to conceptualising resilience capacities and poverty dynamics. Sections 3, 4, and 5 outline absorptive, anticipatory and adaptive, and transformative resilience capacities, respectively, and how these relate to poverty reduction drivers. Section 6 concludes.
This section brings together a poverty dynamics framing with a focus on resilience capacities (to both climate change and poverty) to ground the articles in this IDS Bulletin. A focus on the dynamics of poverty is an explicit attempt to move mainstream poverty discourse away from a static view of poverty to drive more effective poverty reduction programming. These poverty dynamics may be categorised in terms of a tripod and defined as follows (Shepherd et al. 2014):
Resilience to climate change in some ways does differ from resilience to poverty, though the two concepts are deeply intertwined. On the one hand, the level and dynamics of poverty influence the levels of assets or security that can make climate resilience possible. Resilience as defined in international development is generally recognised as the capacity over time of a person, household or other aggregate unit to avoid poverty in the face of various stressors and in the wake of myriad shocks. If and only if that capacity is and remains high over time, then the unit is resilient. (Barrett and Constas 2014: 14626).
This definition tends to focus on resilience as an outcome rather than a set of discrete capacities. The climate literature takes a complementary but distinct approach, conceptualising resilience as a set of outcomes, processes, and capacities to enable social systems to respond more specifically to climate change and disasters. These capacities most notably include adaptive, anticipatory, and absorptive capacities, alongside transformative approaches, defined as (Bahadur et al. 2015):
The poverty dynamics literature has drawn on both conceptualisations. It has started to adapt these climate resilience concepts from the climate literature, extending them to focus more explicitly on people’s lived experiences and the shocks they and their communities experience (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin). This includes, for example, consideration of shocks such as ill-health, stressors such as adverse gender or other social norms, and crises including climate-related disasters. Transformation in turn also includes the ways in which community or state-level capacities can be built or reshaped to support sustained escapes from poverty. At present, our evidence suggests that there is general reliance on individuals and households to build their own resilience, with often relatively few inputs from programmes or policies.
Finally, there is also a close relationship between these resilience capacities and poverty dynamics. Tackling chronic poverty through social assistance, for example, should strengthen households’ absorptive capacities when disasters strike.
Impoverishment can be prevented through insurance or early warning systems, for example, which are key anticipatory resilience capacities that can reduce the impacts of climate variability. Livelihood support and asset development (including of intangible assets such as education) can enable households to develop the tools with which to diversify enterprises and risks and adapt to climate extremes. A systems approach to addressing climate vulnerabilities centred around the needs of people in or near poverty who face the most severe vulnerabilities and consequences of climate change can yield sustained transformation.
At the same time, these relationships are far from linear. For example, adaptive capacities are important not only for developing sustained poverty escapes but also in enabling chronically poor households to escape poverty in the first place. The extent of resilience capacity development may also be constrained by structural barriers rooted in adverse gender norms constraining women’s economic participation and resource ownership or entrenched patterns of group-based socio-political exclusion. In addition, there are various feedback loops in play; for example, between adaptive capacity development and upward mobility, or a vicious cycle of asset depletion reducing absorptive capacities and perpetuating poverty. Moreover, while the characteristics of climate resilience and resilience to poverty may be comparable, what one is resilient to may still differ – resilience to poverty is arguably more multidimensional. Finally and somewhat relatedly, while many studies assume that addressing climate adaptation leads to poverty reduction, these may operate in counter directions, as Joseph (this IDS Bulletin) argues.
3.1 Climate change and chronic poverty
As noted above, the relationship between climate change and poverty is largely recognised to be bidirectional and mutually reinforcing. Climate change disproportionately affects poor and rural populations, deepening existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities and reversing development gains (Leichenko and Silva 2014; Serdeczny et al. 2015). On the one hand, poor households are systematically more exposed to climate-related shocks – such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, and disease – and experience more severe welfare losses due to limited coping capacity, low asset holdings, and inadequate social protection systems. Part of this is due to people residing or being pushed to live on marginal landholdings where hazard exposure is strong. Droughts in Zambia are seen to affect almost a third of smallholder farmers in some seasons, especially in the poorer Southern and Western provinces where heat projections are further expected to increase by mid-century (Ngoma, Finn and Kabisa 2024).
The consequences of climatic shocks in turn cascade through multiple dimensions of household welfare, including food security, health, asset accumulation, and long-term economic mobility. Evidence shows that repeated exposure to climatic shocks significantly increases the probability of persistent poverty, often trapping vulnerable households in cycles of deprivation (Diwakar and Lacroix 2021; Ngoma et al. 2024). These shocks compel households to resort to difficult coping strategies – such as reducing food consumption, liquidating productive assets, or withdrawing children from school – that may provide short-term relief but are maladaptive and so weaken future resilience.
3.2 Layered public policies and programmes
These bidirectional relationships imply that the level of welfare or wellbeing at which climate shocks can be resisted, or no longer have an impact on wellbeing status, is higher than often thought by climate experts. Indeed, in a number of low- and middle income countries, resilience – being able to avoid impoverishment in the face of climate (or other) shocks or stressors – is achieved at levels of wellbeing and with assets and capacities very similar to those allowing sustained escapes from poverty (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin). This reinforces the very close relationship between poverty reduction and climate resilience, both conceptually and empirically. Achieving resilience for all entails significant poverty reduction as well as building specific resilience capacities such as through developing household assets (livestock enterprises and mixed farming, irrigated land), adopting climate-appropriate seed varieties among smallholder farmers, education (including the ability to absorb and use climate information), vocational skills training including in climate-resilient sectors, off-farm wage labour and non-agriculture business enterprise, and collective organisation for relevant public works, which will also in turn help reduce poverty for vulnerable people.
Evidence from CPAN work and this IDS Bulletin shows that climate resilience for people in and near poverty can be strengthened by investment in public services and disaster risk management in countries where that is politically and financially feasible. Building system resilience capacities are a necessary complement to supporting household-level resilience. If there is adequate public investment in system resilience for disaster risk management, and other potential sources of resilience – climate-smart agriculture (CSA), economic (including energy) diversification, universal health care and/or health insurance, and more general built-in system resilience capacities – this may compensate for a lack of household-level resilience or complement household efforts. Investment in education, for example, helps households to diversify more rapidly and take advantage of opportunities for enterprise or migration. To continue providing such capacities, the education system too needs to be resilient to the shocks it faces.
A key emphasis on reducing the resilience threshold – i.e. the level at which climate resilience can be achieved for people in and near poverty – is through developing layered public policies and programmes (Shepherd 2025). This layering through multisectoral programmes that may reinforce each other is important because households already in poverty, some experiencing its chronic forms, experience multidimensional deprivations and markedly inadequate incomes (Hulme and Shepherd 2003). Their ability to absorb the effects of crises can be extremely constrained. As a result, people in chronic poverty when faced with prolonged drought or a rapid-onset flood disaster may be driven towards maladaptation, such as through withdrawing children from school, engaging in sex trafficking, or further reducing the quality or number of meals (Heltberg et al. 2012; Davies 1993). All of these have implications for the intergenerational persistence of poverty.
Few high-poverty countries have adequate layered or system level resilience as yet. In many East and Southern African countries, social protection systems cover less than one third of the population, with another 5 per cent of the population also very inadequately covered and less than half of the poorest quintile covered (World Bank 2025), leaving many households exposed to cumulative shocks that push them deeper into poverty. Perhaps as a result, such assistance often has a negligible scale in building household resilience. As Gondwe et al. (this IDS Bulletin) find, coupon subsidies and cash transfers have an insignificant relationship with resilience in the context of repeated weather shocks in Malawi, rendering households particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. This resonates with other literature that finds social protection improves absorptive capacities though with limited effects in reducing long-term vulnerabilities (Lind et al. 2025).
Progress in climate resilience and poverty reduction is, moreover, deeply influenced by the underlying political economy, including configurations of political power and the nature of the social contract. Efforts to transform exclusionary national and local systems in the region must accordingly engage seriously with these political realities. Carter (this IDS Bulletin) examines these governance arrangements and structural drivers of poverty across East and Southern Africa, including questions of how political dynamics can constrain or counteract climate vulnerability in the region.
4.1 Climate change and poverty mobility
Section 3 focused on building the climate resilience of people already in poverty, those often experiencing its most chronic forms. Other poverty trajectories that may emerge from climate related disasters include downward mobility into poverty, or constrained pathways out of poverty. Indeed, the pathway through which climate shocks reduce a household’s resilience include asset effects (e.g. destruction or depletion of assets), livelihood effects (e.g. depressed production, stagnated labour markets, and distress migration), and reduced consumption. The impact of weather shocks on rural livelihoods is mainly transmitted through reduced agricultural productivity and output with subsequent reduction in incomes and consumption (Balisacan et al. 2011; Karfakis, Lipper and Smulders 2012). Reduced agricultural productivity exerts negative shocks on rural livelihoods given the population’s heavy reliance on rain-fed agriculture and natural resources such as timber and non-timber forest products, the production of which depends to a large extent on weather patterns. Indirectly, too, these shocks affect households’ welfare through secondary effects in depressing wages and output prices (Olsson et al. 2014).
These results are regularly observed in East and Southern Africa. In the latter, climatic changes in Zambia are expected to reduce yields of major crops, particularly maize, with losses ranging from 3–6 percentage points in recent years in the most affected regions and potential extremes of -30 to +26 per cent depending on climate variability (Ngoma et al. 2021). At the macroeconomic level, climate-induced agricultural declines are projected to reduce Zambia’s gross domestic product (GDP), with impacts intensifying towards the 2040s and beyond (ibid.). While climate change in Malawi is unlikely to substantially slow overall economic growth in general over the next couple of decades, the impacts are substantial in the agricultural sector with yields projected to decline significantly (Kawaye and Hutchinson 2018). Given Malawi’s heavy dependence on agriculture, climate change is poised to push an increasing number of people into poverty mainly through the agriculture channel.
Evidence from Tanzania establishes a strong link between climate change and reduced national economic growth by up to 4 per cent, and driving an estimated 2.6 million people into poverty by 2050 (World Bank 2024b). This vulnerability is rooted in the structure of Tanzania’s economy, where over 70 per cent of the population depends on rain-fed agriculture, a sector that already experiences declining productivity of some key crops and livestock due to rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and increasingly frequent droughts and floods. Without decisive adaptation measures, climate-induced shocks could also trigger internal displacement affecting as many as 13 million people, amplifying pressures on already strained urban services and infrastructure (ibid.).
There are also ripple effects of these livelihood impacts on national food security. Poor households typically spend 40-60 per cent of their income on food (Hallegatte et al. 2016), making them highly sensitive to climate-induced food price volatility. Precipitation, rainfall, and temperature volatility significantly influence the prices of food and non-food items across East and Southern Africa. This imposes a heavier financial burden on the poor whose expenditure is skewed towards food (Hadley et al. 2023; Dasgupta and Robinson 2022; Niles and Salerno 2018).
Climate change mechanisms of impact thus affect both the chronic poor discussed above, as well as non-poor households, pushing the latter group into poverty. Climate change could push over 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 if no action is taken, primarily through reduced agricultural productivity, health shocks, and rising food prices (Odongo et al. 2022; Hallegatte et al. 2016). Impoverishment in the face of climate related disasters has also been observed in East and Southern Africa (Diwakar 2026; Ngoma et al. 2019). In Zambia, for example, the last decade has seen a greater intensity of climate-related and other crises, with growing numbers of people in poverty. Impoverishment and chronic poverty far outweigh sustained escapes from poverty (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin). In Malawi, Gondwe et al. (this IDS Bulletin) find that shocks including the high costs of agricultural inputs, floods, and irregular rains similarly have a negative relationship with resilience.
4.2 Anticipatory and recovery-focused action
Given this risk-prone environment, strengthened crisis management is critical. Part of the response could include developing or investing in strengthening early warning systems at the meso and macro levels, to support improved climate forecasting, risk monitoring, and local communication infrastructures. At present, anticipatory action is severely underfunded within disaster risk management and reduction, where the focus continues instead to be on reactive disaster responses. Currently, 90 per cent of humanitarian funding globally goes to disaster response rather than anticipatory action or prevention (SPARC Knowledge 2025). Government responses to disasters and preventative action are critical. More commonly, however, in high-poverty countries, international action dominates responses which is itself underfunded (Peters 2019). This underfunding severely limits the potential of anticipatory action, as over half of crises are estimated to be ‘somewhat predictable, and more can be done to fund actions which would help prevent and reduce the impacts of the compounding effect of hazards’ (Peters and Weingärtner 2023: 5).
At the micro level, anticipatory capacities could also be strengthened by insuring people in and near poverty against major risks (Joseph, this IDS Bulletin) such as asset loss (e.g. from theft, climate-related disasters, or conflict). This includes crop, livestock, health, and credit insurance, which should not be viewed as an alternative but rather as a complement to social assistance. Insurance is a key part of the anticipatory action toolkit, as it can buffer loss when climate-related disasters strike (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin).
There are reasons that may explain why this has not yet been done well - for example, due to ‘poverty premiums’ often imposed and paid up front (e.g. at the time of planting when farmers are cash constrained); limited trust, poor quality, and unfamiliarity with insurance products; and insurance provision typically only for specific types of crops or livestock, thus guarding against just a small set of income and asset risks. However, there is evidence to suggest that these challenges can be overcome partly by increasing awareness and revising insurance design such that farmers pay at harvest rather than at the time of planting, for example (Casaburi and Willis 2018). Insurance could form part of a collective risk management approach to guard against downward mobility in the context of the greatly expanded risk environment for people in and near poverty (Diwakar and Shepherd 2022).
Moreover, programmes rarely balance anticipatory action with responses during recovery in the aftermath of crises. Recovery continues to be under-emphasised in policymaking and resource allocation, with the result that impoverishment is often just another shock or crisis away. In this context, continued protection is needed as climate-related disasters and other crises subside to allow for recovery by poor and vulnerable people. Recovery can be anticipated more broadly – financial services can play a role alongside government grants for business re-development, including the adoption of new technologies that aim at achieving higher productivity. Improvements in education access and building household savings can also support this recovery and longer-term resilience building (Gondwe et al., this IDS Bulletin). And for smallholder farmers, value chain improvements, irrigation, soil and water conservation, and mechanisation are some of the means of improving productivity (Kahamba and Xu, this IDS Bulletin). In all cases, it is important to focus on support which can work for the majority, not just the top few businesses or farms, for example.
4.3 Adaptation: climate-resilient ‘growth from below’
The discussion of livelihood development above brings us to a more central focus on adaptation. In this context, ‘growth from below’ – which involves small investments by households in micro-enterprises, smallholder agriculture, the rural non-farm economy, and the urban informal sector – remains central to strengthening resilience (Shepherd et al. 2019). Regarding smallholder agriculture, ensuring that this is environmentally sustainable or climate smart, with an emphasis on agricultural diversification and investments in irrigation and other mechanisms, can support resilience building ‘from below’ (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin). Equally critical is strengthening support to the informal economies through measures that increase productivity and guard against risks, including skills-based training, microfinance initiatives, the integration of informal workers and business enterprises into affordable insurance products, and social protection. These interventions to raise the incomes of the poorest households are feasible within planetary boundaries but require wealthier people to consume fewer material goods (Hickel and Sullivan 2024).
Climate-resilient ‘growth from below’ can also be enabled through diversification, which can in turn support household adaptation to climate stresses to enable upward mobility. Even diversification by one household member into low-skilled occupations such as petty trading, food processing, or wage labour can improve security. Most households with adult labour already have such diversified portfolios of occupations, which are often natural resource based such as brick making or charcoal manufacture; supporting these households to become more productive through technological or value chain interventions can be helpful.
At the same time, the adoption of climate adaptation itself does not guarantee poverty escapes, as there can be various preconditions. Households reducing poverty while adapting to climate change in rural Zambia (Joseph, this IDS Bulletin) and Zimbabwe (Nembaware, this IDS Bulletin) typically had formal education or skills-based training that enabled them to pivot livelihoods and diversify productive assets. Their adaptive capacity, strengthened through education and training, enabled them to reinvest profits between different livelihood streams and use this to help smooth consumption amid climate-related disasters. Diversification within agriculture into livestock, and outside of agriculture into non-farm enterprises, were also key pathways to concurrently escape and remain out of poverty (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin).
Given that the mainstay of much of the rural population living in poverty continues to be agriculture, livelihood support programmes and policies need to address weather shocks urgently. As discussed above, this may include climate-smart and/or environmentally sustainable agriculture. Yet when considering the evidence base on CSA, challenges in uptake among smallholder farmers remain. CSA requires reinvesting in extension and research for poor and vulnerable households, without which it will be difficult for smallholder farmers to adopt climate-smart approaches. It also requires moving away from monocrop and agro-chemical focus to a more rounded approach to soil fertility, including livestock development, which is important for escaping poverty and staying out (Shepherd et al., this IDS Bulletin). CSA adaptations (including seeds, micro-irrigation, mechanisation, and soil and water conservation) are important but remain challenging for people living in poverty, and they will need significant external support. Tackling the challenges they face will be very helpful.
One institutional mechanism through which such support can be mobilised is agricultural public–private partnerships (PPPs), which can help coordinate investment and expand access to services to advance CSA. Yet, though these partnerships are found to contribute to farmers’ absorptive capacity, their ability to build adaptive capacity remains constrained due to weak seed supply systems, high input prices, market instability, and limited infrastructure and availability of low-cost technologies (Kahamba and Xu, this IDS Bulletin). This stems from farmers’ primary objectives being rooted in production rather than resilience. Yet farmers now live in a world where they need to build their resilience to climate change, which is happening fast. It is not just about producing more, though that helps if there are markets to absorb the product. Asking whether typical Green Revolution style approaches are capable of building resilience is, therefore, an important question.
More broadly, the discussion above suggests that reducing sources of environmental risk and supporting environmental sustainability needs to be on more of an equal footing with promoting socially inclusive economic growth. There are different entry points that have enabled this joining up to be prioritised. For example, Kenya’s devolution policy under the 2010 Constitution also included steps to enhance government responsiveness to citizens, while its social movements including the civil society organisation-led Kenya Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Forum and the government’s Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda supported a move towards prioritising environmental sustainability and social inclusion within growth agendas (Diwakar et al. 2025). Climate funds can also offer an important entry point, as the intention is to integrate development and environmental objectives within them (Kamninga 2025). In all of these pathways, diverse partnerships, engagement across scales, and rigorous consultation with multisectoral actors have supported this transformation (Carter, this IDS Bulletin).
5.1 Climate change and intersecting inequalities
The inclusion agenda discussed above remains central to effective programming to support climate resilience alongside poverty reduction. In high-poverty countries and in crisis contexts, there may be large numbers of people in need, and so it is important to consider gradations of vulnerability and intersections with inequalities due to wealth, gender, area of residence, disability, displacement status, and other markers (Diwakar 2026). For example, rural women living in poor households may experience heightened difficulty during floods due to limited mobility and exclusion from decision-making due to adverse gender norms, inadequate infrastructure in remote areas, and deprivations due to poverty – all of which increase vulnerability and limit recovery prospects.
Indeed, gender disparities have also been identified as a determinant of poverty dynamics. For example, women-headed households in rural Zambia were identified as experiencing fewer income-based pathways to resilience, benefit less from livestock and wage opportunities, and show lower levels of education and asset ownership (Diwakar et al. 2020). The analysis further indicated that youth-headed households face similarly constrained opportunities. Generally, both groups are disproportionately represented among impoverished households. Similarly, in Malawi, evidence shows that women are more likely to be poor than men. A poverty and gender analysis by the World Bank (2021) found that poverty is highest for single mothers and households with only one female adult and children – these are the poorest of all household types. Further, the study findings indicate that poverty risk rises for women between 25 and 50 years old, the core productive and reproductive years. Households with more children face significantly higher poverty risk.
Poorer farmers and especially women among them faced additional challenges that limited their ability to adapt to climate change. For example, in Tanzania, smallholder women farmers lacked access to microcredit, limiting their ability to smooth consumption amid climate-related disasters. They were also unable to hire trucks or transport crops to distant markets (Kahamba and Xu, this IDS Bulletin). This often meant that their ability to secure higher profits was curtailed by a reliance on sometimes exploitative middlemen. More broadly, women’s adaptation strategies may be constrained by structural factors including unequal access to resources, decision-making agency, and institutional support (UN Women 2020).
These poverty outcomes, moreover, are amplified in the face of shocks including climate-related disasters. For example, an analysis of gender differences in poverty dynamics and shocks in Tanzania found that even while there was little difference between households headed by men and those headed by women in terms of the reporting of shocks, the consequences were especially pronounced for poor women-headed households. In particular, a larger share of women-headed households in poverty reported the loss of both income and assets as a result of shocks, mainly climate-related disasters such as drought and flooding (Diwakar 2025).
5.2 Special measures
Transformative action would accordingly require such groups experiencing intersecting inequalities to be empowered through bottom-up interventions, provided with choices in top-down programmes, presented with low-cost preventative mitigation measures and options during crises, and supported through accountable, gender equality, disability, and social inclusion (GEDSI)-responsive governance systems. As Carter (this IDS Bulletin) identifies from her review, a gender lens is critical to system-strengthening efforts, both to understand the impacts of crises and how to build resilience. This is because gender and socioeconomic status significantly affect the ability of individuals and households to adapt to climate change. For example, women in Zimbabwe strengthened their economic independence through skills development and community engagement, while young adults more commonly leveraged technology and diversified livelihoods, including through migration (Nembaware, this IDS Bulletin).
Spousal collaboration also comes out as transformative in supporting sustained escapes from poverty (Diwakar and Shepherd 2022). Joseph (this IDS Bulletin) reflects on its importance also in dual aspects of poverty reduction alongside climate adaptation. For example, households sustaining escapes from poverty saw husbands and wives working collaboratively around financial management and livelihood decision-making in response to climate-related shocks and stressors.
Building on this, social assistance also needs to address gendered risks such as intra-household conflict leading to separation or divorce – linking affected women to health and legal support, keeping children in school, and promoting women’s economic diversification through tailored financial services. This requires a bigger push than has so far been recorded in policies or programming. Graduation programmes, for example, represent an intensive version of this push but show various drivers of heterogeneity depending, for example, on the gender of the head and labour availability (Sabates-Wheeler, Sabates and Devereux 2018; Misha et al. 2019). While there has been increasing attention to gender in economic inclusion programmes, the multi-layered constraints require multisectoral interventions (Andrews et al. 2021) that address multiple sources of gendered and climate risks. As part of this, programming needs to acknowledge not just demographic markers but also the geographic or spatial dimensions of deprivation during times of crises – which may vary by area of residence (urban vs rural) or hotspots of crises (e.g. areas of severe prolonged drought) (Diwakar 2026).
These special measures inherently draw to the fore issues of power, inequalities, and underlying political or governance arrangements that may influence these. This includes consideration of power shifts in gender relationships, in particular in the extent to which women can independently own resources, earn wages, and engage in markets equal to men. At the same time, governments need to recognise the value of investing in anticipatory actions, and acknowledge the need for significantly greater investment in some quite expensive aspects of agricultural development. These include irrigation, flood control, mechanisation, soil and water conservation, and all-round soil health improvements, as well as the conventional adaptive seeds and fertilisers which form the core of most smallholder development programmes to date. Significant work with opinion leaders, parliamentarians, civil society, including farming and trading associations, as well as technocrats, will be needed to drive such changes in norms and priorities. Carter (this IDS Bulletin) presents an overview of what some of these considerations may usefully focus on in bridging the divide to overcome systemic constraints in achieving both climate resilience and poverty reduction simultaneously.
Climate change has become one of the most significant threats to poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, cyclones, and storms, are threatening agricultural systems, eroding household assets, and worsening existing social and economic vulnerabilities. There is growing evidence that climate shocks significantly increase the likelihood of chronic poverty and threaten sustained poverty escape. Climate vulnerability, moreover, is deeply connected with structural inequalities. Women-headed and youth headed households, households with limited asset bases, and communities in ecologically fragile regions face disproportionately higher risks and have fewer pathways to resilience.
Despite these challenges, pathways to resilience exist across the region, and notable among these are environmentally sustainable or climate-smart agriculture, including investment in livestock development, diversified livelihood strategies beyond the farm (including non-agricultural enterprises, off-farm wage labour supply), and strengthened early warning and recovery systems that support these strategies. Social protection systems, although currently limited in coverage, have the potential to reduce vulnerability when effectively expanded and targeted. Investments in climate-response systems, and gender-responsive development planning, education, and health are essential to safeguard the gains recorded and prevent more vulnerable households falling into impoverishment. Building resilience requires coordinated, multisectoral actions that are informed by evidence and responsive to regional variations in risk and vulnerability, implying a degree of decentralised action and leadership.
Drivers of joined-up decision-making – for example, bringing together social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and economic transformation objectives – include the presence of trigger events, international expectations (e.g. the SDGs or environmental standards), and devolution with political momentum and strengthened capacity (Pickard and Lemma 2022; Colenbrander et al. 2022). Climate-based initiatives are perhaps a more effective entry point typically in joining up these three areas, compared to the spread of current social and economic policies. This was evidenced through green credit conditions or well conceived and structured climate finance (Bird 2022). At the same time, there is some evidence that current climate finance is often not poverty focused (LSE 2023), so this requires a shift towards gender-sensitive, poverty-targeted, locally led programmes rather than one-off projects. This process more broadly requires directed effort to overcome institutional and individual obstacles to this joint action (Colenbrander et al. 2022).
Fostering integrated decision-making to support climate resilience alongside sustained poverty reduction is no easy task, requiring deliberate multisectoral action. The articles in this IDS Bulletin provide entry points into what this action might look like, for individuals, households, communities, nations, and international systems seeking to achieve these dual outcomes to drive lasting change.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funder.
2 Vidya Diwakar, Deputy Director, Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
3 Andrew Shepherd, Director, Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) and Honorary Associate, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
4 Brian Mulenga, Executive Director, Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI), Zambia.
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© 2026 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2026.169
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 57 No. 2 July 2026 ‘Climate Resilience and Poverty Reduction’.