Climate & Health Resilience

At Pathfinder, climate change puts everything we strive for at risk. The climate crisis threatens the ability of each person to be healthy, thrive, and live the life they choose—but this is especially true for women and girls. Unintended pregnancies, gender-based violence, early and forced marriage, unsafe births and abortions increase during climate disasters.

Climate resilience is critical to health and forging pathways to sexual and reproductive health and rights for all. Around the world, we apply locally led solutions to climate and health resilience, delivering crucial services to women and girls while helping communities adapt to the climate crisis. We partner with women and young people to develop climate innovations that brighten the future of entire communities and nations.

• Climate change affects every aspect of life. It increases health risks, hinders sexual and reproductive health and rights, increases food and water insecurity, and worsens existing inequities—in every country where we work. These negative impacts are not gender neutral: women and girls are often disproportionately affected.
• Climate change could undo decades of progress in global health. The health impacts of a changing climate may overwhelm already strained health systems, making access to sexual and reproductive health more challenging for women and communities.
• We center women and young people in climate resilience programming because these investments generate durable improvements to key outcomes, helps ensure services and programming remain in place, and ultimately leads to communities that are more equitable, healthy, and sustainable.

• Enhance health and health system resilience. We assess the climate resilience and preparedness of health systems and apply tailored solutions that enable them to provide continuous, high-quality, climate-responsive services through environmental pressures and climate disasters.
• Partner with communities to manage the impacts of climate change. We work with communities on climate preparedness planning and gender-transformative climate actions. Our programs combine climate, health, and livelihood activities, addressing the entire spectrum of climate-related challenges each community faces and centering the needs of women and girls. We deliver essential information through digital applications, connecting individuals with social safety nets and resources for climate resilience and education so they can adapt and thrive.
• Support the leadership of women and young people: We actively shift power toward women and girls, enhancing their participation, voice, and agency in climate actions and decision-making. We build the leadership capabilities of young people, partnering with academic and private-sector partners to build the next generation of climate leaders and innovators. At the same time, we ensure women and young people have continued access to reliable healthcare during climate disasters.
• Advocate for health and gender in climate policies: We advocate for policies that integrate climate resilience, health, and gender, so that governments prioritize health with climate actions, and account for the needs of women and girls in climate action plans.

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