Called ‘Fighting Climate Change: Human solidarity in a divided world’, the report attempts to explain what climate change means for the world’s 2.6 billion who survive on less than two dollars a day.

“We wanted to bring a distinctive human development analytical framework to the problem, and what came out of the analysis is that we are dealing with a systemic threat to development to which there is no obvious historical precedent and no parallel,” lead author Kevin Watkins told The Indian Express ahead of the report’s release.

The Millennium Development Goals on health, education and sanitation may actually begin to get reversed. The report illustrates this through a number of examples: Indian women, during a flood in the 1970s, were 19 per cent less likely to have attended primary school.

Climate shocks like droughts and floods have resulted in grave setbacks in nutritional status, especially of women. Studies quoted in the report show that periods of low consumption and rising food prices, following such extreme events, are strongly associated with deaths among girls than boys.

Even within India, it is an inequitable world: research in Indian villages in the 1990s found that even slight variations in rainfall timing could reduce farm profits for the poorest quartile of respondents by one-third while having a negligible impact on profitability for the richest quartile.

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