Climate change has different consequences for the health of women and men
The health risks men and women are exposed to and the illnesses they develop vary widely across lifetimes and places. Yet climate policy and health services often overlook these differences.
Climate change impacts men and women differently, yet most climate policies and health services overlook these gender disparities. For instance, more women than men die from indoor air pollution caused by cooking fires, while men are more likely to succumb to heat-related illnesses in most adult life stages. In Europe, women face higher risks of heat-related deaths during heat waves, while in Latin America and the Caribbean, men die from heat-related causes nearly twice as often as women.
Despite these disparities, existing monitoring systems fail to separate women's and men's experiences, leading to oversimplified data and under-informed decision-making. Only one indicator out of 45 in the analyzed reports measures results separately for women and men. Most data is categorized by gender at collection but merged into a single total before being incorporated into monitoring systems, making it difficult to discern the distinct health effects on women and men.
Women are more exposed to cooking smoke and suffer from it more, but men, who often have pre-existing heart and lung conditions from exposure to dust, fumes, and diesel exhaust, experience greater damage from smaller exposures to smoke. Knowing the reasons behind these differences—be it exposure, susceptibility, or access to resources like cooling, transportation, or care—can guide intervention efforts.
Currently, only the Lancet Countdown's count of outdoor workers reveals sex-specific differences among the 211 assessed indicators. The Belém Adaptation Indicators, which track climate adaptation, also split data by sex, but these could be published by sex in future reporting cycles with minimal additional data collection. Meanwhile, other indicators like the WHO's health ministry survey, the scorecard grading countries' climate plans, and the Lancet Countdown report only mention sex or gender in a few instances.
The U.N.'s new yardstick for climate adaptation, the Belém indicators, still need to be defined at the global level for publication in November 2027. So far, only three out of 16 expert proposals for health indicators requested sex-specific results, with only one actually adopted.
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