Exploring the Intersections of Climate Change, Health, and Gender

AIR Senior Researcher Jessie Pinchoff is an internationally recognized expert in climate change, global health, and gender. Her research broadens our understanding of the direct and indirect effects of climate change on everyday life around the world. In this Q&A, she shares insights about how climate change affects women, girls, and young people, and how innovative research approaches can be used to generate evidence of climate change dynamics.  

Q: How did you become interested in population health and climate change in international contexts?

Pinchoff: I’ve always been very interested in global health. As an undergraduate, I studied in South Africa and did some research on HIV and health systems. In my master’s program, I studied malaria and other infectious diseases, especially ones transmitted by vectors like mosquitoes, and became interested in how the environment around people’s homes contributes to transmission. Conditions like living near different types of water sources, heat, and humidity affect how far mosquitoes can fly, where they breed, and why these diseases persist.

Even then, I saw how climate change was shifting some of these patterns. Once you dig into global health, you realize that climate change is affecting everything. It can affect our health in direct ways, like increasing rates of malaria transmission, and in indirect ways, like changing gender dynamics or disrupting access to schools.

Q. Much of your work applies a gender lens to climate change and population health. Why is this important—and what are the key takeaways from this research?

Pinchoff: Women and girls disproportionately bear the brunt of the climate crisis. For example, some of my earlier work found that exposure to high salinity in drinking water from sea level rise and coastal intrusion from storms resulted in an increase of preeclampsia among pregnant women. That’s a direct health outcome from climate change.

Over time, I’ve realized how much gendered behaviors and norms are also affected by climate change, which can increase risks for women and girls. For example, during extreme weather events like a cyclone, women and girls are less likely to be able to access information about what they are supposed to do. They don’t receive that early warning. They may not be literate, so they may not be able to read the alerts. They may not be allowed to leave home to seek shelter without their spouse or a male chaperone.

In terms of gender dynamics, women are taking on more formal agricultural roles and work, but also a much bigger burden of domestic work. It’s drudge work, like walking farther to collect water and doing more childcare if their kids aren’t in school. Some research, including a recent paper I coauthored, also shows that events like heat waves result in increased domestic violence.

Women in some countries also may not be able to access drought-resistant crops or climate adaptation programs because, as women, they are not permitted to own land. Lastly, they are often excluded from policymaking for important climate policies that would affect their lives. But some evidence suggests that when women and girls are included in policymaking, they make more climate-friendly choices. So, I think there’s no way to address climate justice without also addressing gender inequalities.  

Q. What research approaches are you taking to understand the dynamics of climate change and population health?

Pinchoff: As a global health and development researcher, I’ve always collected anthropometric data—like blood pressure and blood samples to test for malaria—and surveys to ask about people’s experiences to find out whether climate change contributed to health outcomes. But survey data can be subjective: People who recently experienced a heat wave or a flood might tell you it’s been hot or rainy all year. You could set up a lot of monitoring devices to measure temperature or rainfall accurately, but they’re very expensive and they might record information only at a very specific location.

The United Nations Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which AIR supports, provides super-detailed climate data through its agroclimatology portal. We can overlay this objective, location-specific climate data with surveys, administrative information, and surveillance data. This allows us to do spatial analyses on the relationships between climate and health or other outcomes.

Another innovation we’re exploring at AIR is considering how climate change might affect the programs we evaluate. For example, AIR is conducting an impact evaluation of the Nigeria for Women Project, a program implemented by the government of Nigeria and supported by the World Bank and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This program aims to support women’s financial inclusion and livelihoods using savings group approaches. We’re analyzing the linkages of this program with climate shocks, including examining whether the effectiveness of savings groups varies by whether the women experienced a drought. There’s also some research showing that climate change can shift dynamics and exacerbate tensions within households. Exploring these dynamics is pretty innovative.

Q. What challenges do you face in your work?

Pinchoff: The major challenge is a lack of data in countries where we’re working. We can use satellite information to gauge climate information for most places in the world, but detailed data on people are harder to get. How are people behaving? How are they changing what they’re farming? In certain African countries, there’s not a lot of infrastructure for reporting data. I use a lot of USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data, which provides accurate and representative data in more than 90 countries, but there can be years between DHS survey rounds. DHIS2, an open source software platform used by health ministries in more than 80 countries, offers timely data, but at the facility level. So it’s limited on demographic information or household characteristics.

Another recent challenge is migration data, which I encountered for a study of how migration shapes contraceptive use among urban young women in six African countries. The International Organization for Migration collects data on international migration—the number of people moving from one country to another. But rigorous evidence about widespread mobility within countries is really challenging to come by.  
 

Q. You’ve studied how climate change is shaping young people’s lives in Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Nigeria. What did your research reveal?

Pinchoff: An important piece of our approach is partnering with local organizations, because it’s so clear that we must center the experiences of people who are living with the climate crisis. For one project in my previous job, we collaborated with Women Deliver, a global advocacy organization that works in these countries. Adolescents and young people between the ages of 12 and 25 in affected communities in Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Nigeria shared how climate change affected different aspects of their lives.

They told us about perceived increases in absenteeism and dropout rates in schools due to climate events. Many of them described school structures as dilapidated. After a flood or a heat wave, they don’t have enough food and water, making it more difficult to learn and pay attention in those conditions. In all three settings, girls are getting married at younger ages immediately after climate events.

Most of the young people said they were worried about climate change, generational poverty, and their futures. Kids feel like they are supposed to do better than their parents, make more money, have better jobs. But they don’t think that will happen for them. If they don’t finish school, they’ll only be able to get manual labor jobs. Agriculture is a viable career in rural areas, but they are worried about that, too.

It’s very challenging to meaningfully engage young people in the climate crisis. You want to create opportunities for engagement, but you also don’t want to put the burden of addressing climate change onto 15-year-olds in Bangladesh. They’re not the ones creating this crisis.