Poverty and Vulnerability: A Static vs Dynamic Assessment of a Population Subjected to Climate Change Shock in Sub-Saharan Africa

Angela Baschieri, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)

Despite the effects of climate change being evident at a global scale, its negative impact will severely affect those communities highly dependent on natural resources. The emerging threat of climate change to household’s welfare calls for more research to assess the household’s probability to fall into poverty. This would require a combined analysis of the potential risk of experiencing climate-related extremes (such as droughts or floods) and the household’s ability to cope with such events. This research aims to extend a methodology developed by “micro-economists” and explicitly models the unexplained household components (i.e. idiosyncratic household component, error term) using Geographical Information System technique. Using data from the fifth round of the Ghana Living Standard Survey and detailed maps of rainfall variability and soil types, the research attempts to model the heterogeneous household shock, provides a profile of the most vulnerable and also highlights the gains obtained from this approach.