UNDP’s 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Warns Climate Crisis Could Reverse India’s Hard-Won Poverty Gains
SDG 1: No Poverty | SDG 13: Climate Action
Institutions: NITI Aayog | Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation | Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
The 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), released by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), reveals that 1.1 billion people across 109 countries continue to live in acute multidimensional poverty, facing overlapping deprivations in health, education, and living standards. The report’s central warning is that the climate crisis is reshaping global poverty, with 887 million poor people worldwide exposed to at least one of four climate hazards, high heat, drought, floods, and air pollution, and 309 million facing three or more simultaneously.
The burden falls disproportionately on South Asia, where 99.1% of all poor people (380 million) face at least one climate shock. The report cautions that the convergence of climate vulnerability and poverty deepens structural disadvantages for communities with limited assets and social protection, threatening to erode recent human development gains.
For India, the report highlights remarkable national progress: according to NITI Aayog’s analysis, 24.82 crore (248.2 million) people were lifted out of multidimensional poverty between 2013–14 and 2022–23, positioning India to halve poverty well before 2030, in line with the SDG 1 target. This achievement was driven by improvements across all 12 national MPI indicators, especially in access to cooking fuel, sanitation, housing, nutrition, and electricity. However, the 2025 Global MPI underscores that these gains are highly exposed to climate risks, with drought- and heat-prone districts now facing compounded vulnerability unless welfare, livelihood, and adaptation policies converge.
The 2025 MPI reframes poverty reduction as a climate resilience agenda. For India, integrating climate risk mapping into MPI tracking can help identify at-risk districts and target adaptive social protection, green employment, and resilient infrastructure. Sustaining progress requires aligning the National MPI framework with climate adaptation missions, ensuring that welfare delivery systems remain responsive to environmental shocks that disproportionately affect the poorest.
What is Multidimensional Poverty Index? → It is a metric developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP that measures acute poverty across three critical dimensions: health, education, and living standards. Unlike income-based poverty measures, the MPI uses ten indicators (including nutrition, school attendance, and access to sanitation/electricity) to identify if a person is deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators. The MPI value is the product of the headcount ratio (incidence of poverty) and the intensity of poverty (average deprivations suffered).
Follow the full report here: UNDP 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index