Differential exposure: How climate change hits the poor the hardest

Among Indian firms, the paper finds smaller non-agricultural firms are more exposed to flooding and heat than larger firms

With the United Nations (UN) climate change conference, or the Conference of the Parties (COP29), scheduled to be held in less than a month, it is painfully evident that the climate crisis continues to escalate beyond the global efforts to temper it. While no country is immune to the impact of climate change, the world’s poorest countries and people will bear the greatest burden.

In this context, a recent research paper published by the World Bank gives interesting insights regarding the distributional consequences of climate change and global warming in South Asia. The paper uses spatially