Climate Change Hits Women Hardest. It’s Time Our Solutions Reflected That.

The useful part

Imagine being nine months pregnant with no clinic to give birth in and no skilled birth attendant anywhere within reach. At that moment, there were a total of 650,000 pregnant women living in the disaster zone. What happened to them is what happens to women everywhere when climate disasters strike, and most countries are not prepared for it.

How it works

• Decades of working in women's health and human rights have made one thing clear:
• It accelerates poverty that disproportionately affects women and young people.
• It puts women and girls at reproductive health risk, especially in communities where rights and resources are already fragile.
• Policymakers and governments must ensure disaster response plans treat gender-based violence as a public health emergency.
• They need to ensure that when climate disasters strike, access to contraception and reproductive healthcare does not disappear overnight.

What to take from it

They need to make sure that when they talk about climate resilience, they are prioritizing the health and safety of women and girls. A movement that does not center the people bearing the heaviest burden is an incomplete one.

Details worth keeping

Climate change accelerates violence against women. The climate movement has fought hard and made strides.