From pregnancy and maternal health to gender-based violence, women bear the brunt of the climate crisis. Climate policy must finally reflect that reality.
Imagine being nine months pregnant with no clinic to give birth in and no skilled birth attendant anywhere within reach. This was the reality for 73,000 women who were weeks away from their due date in my native province of Sindh, Pakistan, when catastrophic floods submerged the region in 2022. At that moment, there were a total of 650,000 pregnant women living in the disaster zone. Those women were not a statistic to me; they were my community members.
What happened to them is what happens to women everywhere when climate disasters strike—and most countries are not prepared for it.
Decades of working in women’s health and human rights have made one thing clear: Climate change is not gender neutral.
- Climate change accelerates violence against women.
- It accelerates poverty that disproportionately affects women and young people.
- It puts women and girls at profound reproductive health risk, especially in communities where rights and resources are already fragile.
Treating these disastrous effects as a footnote is not just a moral failure; it is a strategic one. If we do not center women’s health in our climate solutions, those solutions will keep failing those most affected by the crises.
And to be clear, this is not someone else’s crisis abroad. This is happening right here, in communities across America.
When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in 2024, it not only destroyed homes and knocked out power. It shut down the region’s only abortion clinic and forced third-trimester, high-risk patients to be transferred out of state. The region was already what we call a maternity care desert, with only half of the local facilities offering obstetric care for the region’s 153,000 women of reproductive age. The hurricane made an already dire situation catastrophic.
Other climate events affect women in a quieter way at the biological level. A University of Southern California study found that exposure to wildfire smoke and heat stress after the 2025 Los Angeles fires, even in the month before conception, was associated with a greater likelihood of delivering an underweight baby. For women living in the most climate-vulnerable neighborhoods, that risk nearly doubled. We also know that prolonged heat exposure is linked to preterm birth, stillbirth, preeclampsia and miscarriage.
The patterns we see in the U.S., Pakistan and across the world are not isolated incidents—they are part of a deeper, systemic pattern that the broader climate movement needs to start taking seriously.
- For every 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature, intimate-partner violence increases by approximately 5 percent.
- Femicides, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, spike 28 percent during heat waves.
- When climate disasters disrupt girls’ education (which they consistently do), rates of child marriage and unintended pregnancy increase exponentially.
A Roadmap for Centering Women in Climate Response
The good news is there are organizations already doing this work—and doing it successfully.
For 60 years, Population Action <a href="https://absafricatv.com/seb-asset-management-ab-takes-position-in-<a href="https://absafricatv.com/tate-brothers-face-new-charges-amidst-international-legal-challenges-law/” title=”Tate Brothers Face New Charges Amidst International Legal Challenges | Law”>international-business-machines-corporation-ibm/” title=”SEB Asset Management AB Takes Position in International Business Machines Corporation $IBM”>International (PAI) has partnered with civil society groups around the world to secure policy protections for the communities most at risk and improve access to care in climate-affected regions.
In Malawi, Bangladesh and Mexico, PAI’s partners are fighting to ensure reproductive health is written into disaster preparedness and adaptation plans, so that even in moments of crisis, contraception, safe childbirth and gender-based violence responses are protected.
PAI has also been a leading force driving the U.S. government to fund the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.N.’s sexual and reproductive health agency, which delivers essential emergency reproductive health kits to women and girls within hours of a climate disaster striking. This is what centering women in crisis response looks like in practice.
But this critical work is now under threat.
The United States not only pulled its funding from UNFPA, cutting off one of the most direct and proven lifelines to women in climate emergencies around the world—it also denied future funding to the organization as well.
At the same time, the U.S. has stepped back from key global climate commitments, weakening the very frameworks designed to coordinate response, mobilize re
Together, these decisions do more than reduce funding—they unravel hard-won progress at the intersection of climate resilience, health and human rights, at a moment when the need has never been greater.
Policymakers and governments must ensure disaster response plans treat gender-based violence as a public health emergency. They need to ensure climate adaptation plans protect girls’ access to education, because when schools close after a disaster, it is the girls who don’t return. They need to ensure that when climate disasters strike, access to contraception and reproductive healthcare does not disappear overnight. And they need to make sure that when they talk about climate resilience, they are prioritizing the health and safety of women and girls.
The climate movement has fought hard and made strides. But a movement that does not center the people bearing the heaviest burden is an incomplete one. Climate leaders, negotiators and policymakers must do more than acknowledge that women are disproportionately affected; they must build solutions into every plan, every policy and every dollar spent. The infrastructure and the expertise exist. What is missing is the political will, and the funding, to match the scale of the crisis.
Women in Pakistan, East Africa, Latin America and right here in the United States have long navigated crises that were not of their making, with extraordinary resilience. The climate crisis will not wait, and neither will the women living on its frontlines. It’s time for climate solutions to finally catch up.
A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
Tagged: Abortion Access, Climate Change, Donald Trump and the Trump Administration, Environmental Justice, Global Women’s Rights, Sexual and Reproductive Health, United Nations
About Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins
Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins is the president and CEO of PAI.
