Climate Crisis Endangers Women, Girls, Pregnant People

Get the Insider App

You can choose from a personalized feed, summary mode, or ad-free experience.

Get the app

Climate change poses a risk to approximately half of the people on Earth. grim reportThe United Nations published this week’s findings. Rising temperatures pose greater safety and health concerns for women and girls than they do for men.

Rupa Basu (chief of climate and air epidemiology at California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment), said that all women are at higher risk. She was not involved with the report.

According to the report, women and girls are more likely than men, to die in extreme weather events. They also face greater risk of being subject to domestic and sexual violence and to experience food insecurity. These disasters can create serious complications in a pregnant woman.

“Women are more vulnerable, and this because we see that the climate change exacerbates existing inequality so much,” Marlene Achoki who co-leads global climate justice policy for humanitarian organization CARE told Insider.

According to the report men often have control of critical resources like food and water. However, women have less credit and mobility to help adapt to new situations.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has gathered hundreds to review years of research and prepare its sixth climate assessment. The first group shared its findings last January, focusing on the physical changes that have occurred to our planet. Monday’s publication comes from the second working group and examines how those changes affect ecosystems, as well as human life.

The report projects that extreme weather — floods, droughts, and heat waves — will become more frequent and more severe in the coming decades, driving food and water shortages across the globe. Governments must prepare for these disasters now to protect pregnant women, girls, as well as their health outcomes.

Basu said that “I’m happy that pregnant women and young women are included in this Report,” and added, “For so long they were kind of just overlooked as high-risk populations.”

Women must travel long distances in extreme heat to fetch water. They may be subject to violence

According to the IPCC, women and girls travel out of town to obtain water in areas where there is no tap. During droughts, they often have to walk to more distant water sites, putting them at risk of heat stroke, as well as Gender-based violence.

Aditi Mukherji was the leader of the water chapter in the new IPCC report. She said that women in India have to walk long distances to get water. Achoki said she’s seen the same thing in Kenya.

“It is so hot when I travel to northern part of our nation, which is at the border of the border,” Achoki said. Achoki said that he felt like returning to the plane after landing just one step.

She said that women and girls can sometimes walk as far as 20km (12.5 miles), to fetch water in this heat. They often have to wait in long lines before they can reach the water. According to the IPCC report, this increases their risk of injury, encounters with dangerous animals, sexual abuse, and demand for sexual favors in return for water.

Women and girls can be protected from the effects of droughts by having more access to water. This could include better water storage facilities, wells, community taps, and wells. The challenge is getting governments, organizations, and individuals to pay for these improvements.

“It’s no secret that the solutions are not new or innovative. It’s often about a lack of financing,” Mukerheji explained to Insider.

Pregnancy risks are higher: ‘You feel somewhat helpless in a certain way’

Basu usually runs cold — she’ll find herself shivering on warm, sunny days in Oakland, California. After she became pregnant, however, this changed. She would suddenly heat up and break out into a sweat, whereas everyone around her seemed perfectly content.

She said, “I couldn’t regulate the temperature of my body,”

Although she had studied heat and its effects on high-risk populations like older people, she didn’t anticipate becoming one of them anytime soon.

“I felt like I could feel it now. She said, “I can feel it.” “You feel a little helpless in some way.”

Basu’s experience made it clear that she wondered if pregnant women were also vulnerable to extreme heat.

Soon, she was able to conduct an analysis of almost 60,000 births in 16 California counties. She compared birth outcomes with weekly averages for apparent temperature (which accounts humidity) from parents’ residential zip codes. An increase of 10°F was associated with 8.6% fewer preterm births. The StudyPublished in the American Journal of Epidemiology, 2010.

Since then, Continue reading studiesSimilar relationships have been found between temperature increases and heat waves, as well as a rise in pretermBirths or stillbirths.

Basu stated that only in the past decade have we had any data to support the association of heat and adverse birth outcomes.

Numerous studies, including those cited by the IPCC report, suggest that extreme heat, high levels of airborne particulates, such as those in wildfire smoke, water-related illnesses, and extreme heat are all linked to higher rates for miscarriage, stillbirths, low birthweight, and preterm births.

Even so, heat advisories may not include pregnant women in their recommendations for vulnerable groups. Similar to older or immunocompromised people, Basu said, pregnant people may need to take extra precautions — keeping cool and inactive on hot days, or staying indoors with an air filter when wildfire smoke adds moderate levels of particulate matter to the air.

Basu said that he keeps coming back to the same point: to not just look at all the population and see what’s happening but to also look at high-risk and most vulnerable populations to also be considered. “Then we don’t really see the whole picture.”