Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Publisher: UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford
Edition: 2025 update of the global MPI; annual series produced since 2010
Focus: For the first time, overlaying climate-hazard data on multidimensional poverty across subnational regions
Related: Human Development Report 2025, UNDP’s companion flagship on human development

The global MPI counts poverty as people actually live it: overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards, not income alone. The 2025 edition finds 1.1 billion people multidimensionally poor across 109 countries, and adds a new layer, showing that 887 million of them live where climate hazards strike. Poverty and climate risk, it argues, are now one problem.

The headline

Of 6.3 billion people covered in 109 developing countries, 18.3 percent live in acute multidimensional poverty. Nearly four in five of them, 887 million, are exposed to at least one of four climate hazards: high heat, drought, floods or air pollution. The report frames this as a double burden in which poverty deepens exposure to climate shocks and those shocks, in turn, lock people into poverty. The overlap is sharpest in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Global MPI 2025, key findings: “Poverty and climate shocks create a double burden. Poverty drives exposure to climate hazards. These, in turn, reinforce and prolong poverty.”

The numbers

Scale. 1.1 billion people (18.3%) are multidimensionally poor across 109 countries and 6.3 billion people; 501 million (43.6%) of them are in severe poverty.
Children carry it. 586 million children are poor, more than half of all poor people; 27.8% of children are poor, over double the 13.5% rate among adults.
Climate exposure. 887 million poor people (78.8%) face at least one hazard; 651 million face two or more, 309 million face three or four, and 11 million face all four in a single year.
Which hazards. 608 million poor people are exposed to high heat, 577 million to air pollution, 465 million to floods and 207 million to drought.
Where they live. 740 million poor people (64.5%) are in middle-income countries, and 637 million (55.5%) in lower-middle-income countries.
Two regions, rural. Sub-Saharan Africa (565 million) and South Asia (390 million) hold 83.2% of the poor; rural areas hold 83.5% (958 million).
South Asia’s bind. 99.1% of poor people in South Asia (380 million) face at least one hazard, and 59% (226 million) face three or four.

The counting angle

The MPI exists to count what a monetary line misses. It complements the international $3.00-a-day rate by identifying who is poor, in what ways and how intensely, across 10 indicators, and it disaggregates results into 1,359 subnational regions across 101 countries, by age, by rural or urban area and by the sex of the household head. That granularity is what lets the report lay climate-hazard maps over poverty maps at all. The limit is freshness: 10 countries with 1.9 billion people still rely on data from 2015 or earlier, and among the 20 poorest countries by the MPI, only 3 have data from 2021–2022 or later. The poorest places are counted least often.

Our read: The MPI is the strongest tool for seeing poverty as a bundle of deprivations rather than a single income threshold, and this year it makes the climate overlap legible for the first time. But the picture is only as current as the surveys behind it, and in the places that matter most, those surveys are years out of date.

Watch & read

Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025, the full report and open data (UNDP & OPHI).
Human Development Report 2025, UNDP’s companion flagship on human development.

Figures are as reported in the 2025 global MPI. Climate-hazard estimates cover 108 of the 109 countries and refer to each country’s MPI survey year (2013 to 2023); temperature projections are the report’s own scenario estimates.