Climate change has different consequences for the health of women and men – but the systems tracking it don’t reflect that

Detailed summary

Only one of 45 global climate and health indicators that measure people says whether women or men are affected. The data to fix that mostly exists already.

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.

Some of these differences are stark. For example, more women than men die from being exposed to the smoke of cooking fires, but for most of adult life a man is more likely to die from this exposure than a woman of the same age. In Europe, studies of individual heatwaves have found women to be at higher risk of heat-related death.

In Latin America and the Caribbean though, men die from heat-related causes at nearly twice the rate that women do, according to the Global Burden of Disease study. Coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, this study is the largest systematic effort ever made to count what kills people and what makes them ill, producing comparable estimates of deaths, disease and disability for every country, by age and sex, every year since 1990.

Despite these inequities, the monitoring systems that track climate change and its effects on health fail to capture the full picture. Much of the data is categorised by gender when collected, but when the data is transferred to the monitoring systems, the experiences of women and men are merged into a single total. As a result, the decision-making that informs climate policy and health systems is underpinned by data that is oversimplified.

We have just audited four of those systems: the Belém Adaptation Indicators agreed at last year’s UN climate summit in Brazil, the World Health Organization’s survey of health ministries, a scorecard that grades countries’ climate plans on health and the Lancet Countdown, an annual scientific stock take. Of the 45 indicators from across these four reports that measure people’s lives (rather than tracking systems or plans), only one reports results separately for women and men.

All four reports draw on surveys and death registers that are often separated by sex, then…

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