Hotter Regions Growing Unequal Faster: Not Just in Wealth, But Gender Too

There is a kind of inequality that rarely makes headlines. Incomes rise and fall with the seasons, but wealth accumulates and erodes over much longer stretches of time. And as climate change tightens its grip on the global economy, the question that matters is not only who earns less during a heatwave, but who owns less after years of warming. Researchers Naveen Kumar and Dibyendu Maiti’s paper, "Distributional Impacts of Global Warming on Wealth Inequality", turns toward this more permanent layer of disparity. It brings evidence from a sprawling global dataset of 1,000 subnational regions across nearly 30 years to make a simple but unsettling claim that hotter places are becoming more unequal, and warming has a measurable hand in it.

The paper observes that global warming does not strike evenly. Regions that are already hot, and already poor, experience the steepest rise in wealth inequality. The study finds that a 1°C increase in temperature corresponds to a 0.54-unit rise in the wealth Gini coefficient. It is not an explosive number, but inequality does not need to spike dramatically to matter. It can widen slowly, through diminished savings, depreciated assets, a stalled job, among others. Over a generation, such increments accumulate into gulf.

Much of the climate-economy literature still treats countries as coherent, internally uniform units. This paper refuses that simplification. Instead, the authors work with subnational regions—states, provinces, districts—where the reality of climate exposure is felt. A coastal region’s vulnerability has little to do with a country’s interior plateau; a forested, temperate zone behaves nothing like a semi-arid belt 200km away. Wealth, too, is unevenly distributed within nations, and national averages tend to gloss over both privilege and deprivation. By assembling a panel that traces assets rather than incomes, and by focusing on regions rather than states, the authors allow inequality to show its actual contours.

Heat Creeping into Wealth

The study goes further by adopting heterogeneous-parameter models that let each region respond differently to temperature changes. How could Bangladesh and Belgium share a uniform heat-response coefficient? But it marks a meaningful departure from earlier work, which often treats climate effects as globally constant. The paper also integrates global climate measures alongside local temperature, acknowledging that a warming planet is a shared shock filtered through trade networks, migration flows and capital movements. The statistical machinery is elaborate, but the purpose is straightforward: to isolate how much of the change in wealth inequality over time can be attributed to temperature itself, once the noise of global shocks is stripped away.

The patterns that emerge are geographic and vivid. Hotter regions grow unequal faster. Poorer regions show the largest sensitivity to rising temperatures. Richer, cooler parts of the world appear relatively insulated because they possess buffers. These buffers help preserve assets when incomes fluctuate. Where such protections are thinner, any climate-induced disruption such as an illness and an unproductive season forces households into decisions that narrow their long-term prospects.

The Slow Variables

The authors identify two broad forces shaping this trajectory. One is the erosion of labour productivity driven by heat-related declines in health and education. Hotter years reduce cognitive performance, increase disease burden, and undermine both adult wages and children’s learning. Regions that lose human capital today accumulate less financial capital tomorrow. Assets remain unpurchased, savings remain thin and vulnerability persists.

The other force is the worsening of gender inequality. In many climate-stressed regions, the burden of caregiving, water collection and household maintenance swells with rising temperatures. Women withdraw from paid work or never enter it. The household’s ability to accumulate assets contracts. What appears as a climate effect on wealth is, in part, a growing gender gap in economic participation.

None of this unfolds dramatically. Unlike storms or floods, which produce visible destruction, the mechanisms at work here are incremental like heat-induced fatigue, a child missing school during the harvest season, an illness that drains a family’s savings. These are the slow variables that shape a community’s economic destiny as surely as policy or geography. The temperature-inequality link remains stubbornly stable, particularly in places with limited institutional capacity.

Global Rearrangement

What this means for the Global South is sobering. Besides reducing incomes or damaging crops, climate change is also rearranging the global distribution of wealth. In countries already wrestling with fragile health systems, low female labour participation and inadequate schooling, warming acts as a multiplier. It widens long-standing gaps between regions and deepens the chasm between the wealthy and those who own little beyond their labour. Even without dramatic climatic events, the quiet rise in temperature is enough to tilt the balance.

This paper does not claim to solve the puzzle of global inequality, nor does it issue a broad political manifesto. It expands the frame through which we understand climate impacts. Inequality is not merely a consequence of income flows; it is embedded in the assets people hold, the homes they live in, the land they own, the stability they can fall back on. When temperature erodes these foundations, the damage is more lasting, more generational.

In bringing wealth, not income, into the centre of climate analysis, and in grounding their study in the granular textures of regional data, the authors give us a clearer, more unsettling picture of what warming does to societies. It is not simply a matter of hotter days or weaker harvests. It is a redistribution of the future itself.