Uncovering the climate vulnerability of China’s poverty alleviation frontiers

Poverty alleviation is critical for improving social equity and overall development, but ongoing climate change poses a significant threat for such efforts. A clear example is China’s targeted poverty alleviation campaign, which has recently achieved substantial success but is now under increasing climate pressure. Using multi-source geospatial data, we propose a novel framework to map the extent and types of hotspot regions (i.e. frontiers) of China’s poverty alleviation campaign and assess their associated climate vulnerabilities following the IPCC approach. We identify multi-dimensional inequalities in the climate vulnerabilities of different frontiers, regions, and population. The most vulnerable frontiers are livestock and agri-economy frontiers in western China: although they support less than 5% of the low-income population, they disproportionally occupy 50% of the area. In contrast, frontiers related to more spatially concentrated industries (e.g., tourism and other industries), which cover less than 20% of the total area while supporting over 70% of the population, show lower vulnerability. These results reveal the uneven development and climate risk in China’s poor regions and highlight the importance of industry agglomeration in combating poverty and mitigating future risks. Our study paves the way for global monitoring of poverty alleviation hotspots, informing climate adaptation policy-making and helping to prevent climate-induced poverty recurrence.