Category: Global Health

COP29 and the UNFCCC’s Health Turn: Progress or Peril?

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by Thalia Viveros Uehara and Alicia Ely Yamin

Conclusion of the Digital Symposium Climate Change and Health:

Mobilizing Public International Law into Action

COP29 in Baku underscored what many had feared — a summit defined by missed opportunities. Perhaps this was to be expected, given that it was the second COP in a row held in a petro-state, with more fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance than climate and environmental activists. The pitiful outcome of $300 billion pledged (by 2035) felt more like an insult than a compromise, particularly when compared to Africa’s $163 billion annual expenditure on debt servicing. 

But the disappointment surrounding financing outcomes was merely a symptom of deeper power imbalances, what critical legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi describes as the “structural biases” of global governance institutions. COP29 marked yet another shift in the fragile equilibrium of the underlying logic of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), steering it further toward the ultimate commodification of climate action. What does this mean for the “health turn” that the UNFCCC has recently begun to witness?

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Reproductive Health at Risk: Climate Change and Agrotoxins in Latin America

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by Cristina Rosero-Arteaga

The climate emergency in Latin America is intensifying a long-standing yet underrecognized health crisis: reproductive harm due to agrochemical exposure, particularly for rural women. As shifting climate patterns threaten to exacerbate these harms, it is crucial to bring these issues into the focus of climate action. The region’s human rights framework — including landmark cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and reports by special procedures — has already addressed the realities of agrotoxins and their impact on health rights. In light of human rights obligations, building on these legal advancements by developing climate policy, like national adaptation plans, is essential to give effect to paragraph 12 of the Paris Agreement’s Preamble, which calls for respecting and promoting human rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of women.

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Life rights for reproduction: Voices from the climate-affected rural subalterns

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Women queue to fill their buckets, Bolangir, Odisha, India 18.1.2022.                                                          ©Nairita Roy Chaudhuri

by Nairita Roy Chaudhuri

Most small farmers in rural India directly depend on rainwater for agricultural production and subsistence livelihoods. However, climate change is intensifying droughts, threatening crop productivity, the food and livelihood security of agrarian farmers, and increasing their risks of hunger and malnutrition. Recognizing climate change as a health and existential crisis, adapting to water scarcity and droughts is essential for the sustainable well-being of rural communities, alongside mitigation efforts. The health consequences of climate change intersect with gender, as rural women bear the primary responsibility for ensuring water security for domestic consumption and performing care or reproductive work.

In my doctoral research, I employed ethnographic methods to explore how law can enable rural communities living in postcolonial societies, examined in particular within the framework of gender and colonial power relations, to sustainably adapt to droughts and water scarcity. Conducting fieldwork in the semi-arid belts of rural parts of West Bengal (Puruliya district) and Odisha (Bolangir, Bargarh, and Rayagada districts) between December 2021 and May 2022, I explored the intersections of water (in)security and gendered labor. With over three hundred participants, I qualitatively analyzed climate-affected small farmers’ accounts of water sourcing, their reflections on water’s domestic and agricultural uses, and the gendered division of water-related labor and time. 

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Climate Change and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Africa: The Urgent Need for Intersectional Approaches in Climate Change Policy and Governance

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Photo credit: @wambuigichobi | SMA

A Masai woman raises her fist as other women leaders look on at COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt during one of the debriefs by the Women and Gender Constituency. 

by Faith Lumonya, Esther Wambui, and Eunice Musiime

As global temperatures rise and the frequency of extreme weather events — such as floods, droughts, and heat waves — increases, climate change poses a growing threat to the progress of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Women face intersecting forms of vulnerability depending on their lived realities and experiences. For example, climate change reduces access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, increases rates of sexual risk behavior, and leads to earlier sexual debut, higher prevalence of infectious diseases, and gender based sexual abuse and exploitation — however, these realities are not taken into account in climate change policy and governance.

Climate-related disasters frequently disrupt health care services, limiting women’s access to essential SRH care such as contraceptives and maternal health services. Associated economic and infrastructural damage further hamper access to vital health resources, while the increased instability exacerbates risks of gender-based violence and reproductive health challenges, especially for vulnerable women and girls. Given these compounded risks, it is crucial to integrate SRHR into broader global and national climate adaptation efforts. 

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Lula’s environmental foreign policy, the global far-right, and the climate agenda

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by Danielle Hanna Rached and Denise Vitale

Donald Trump’s second term in office promises to bring turmoil to the global climate agenda. Against the scientific consensus that fossil fuel is leading the world to a climate breakdown, Trump has managed to impose his opportunistic views on the rest of the world. For the amount of $1 billion in campaign contributions, he initiated his vitriolic attacks against climate change (a “big hoax”), embraced the oil and gas industry (“liquid gold”), and vilified scientists and President Joe Biden’s clean energy legislation (“green new scam”). 

In such a scenario, our only hope lies in resistance that might be formed elsewhere. Since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election in 2022, Brazil has desperately tried to claim a leadership position on the issue. Brazil is home to 60% of the Amazon and host to COP30 next year, and Lula’s socio-environmental agenda has had a prominent position from day one. He appointed Marina Silva, a historical leader of the environmental movement, to head the Ministry of the Environment and created the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples to push forward the Indigenous agenda. 

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The impacts of climate change on the right to health in the United Kingdom 

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by Rossella De Falco

Climate change is one of the most pressing threats to health in the U.K. While climate change impacts everyone, marginalized groups and those with pre-existing health conditions are suffering the most, leading to greater health inequalities. This article explains how climate change impacts the health of the most marginalized populations in the U.K. from a human rights perspective. Read More

Reinventing South African Trade Unions to Protect the Health of Informal Workers in the Face of Climate Change

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by Cecile de Villiers

South Africa is considered the most unequal country in the world, with stagnant economic growth and staggeringly high unemployment. More than five million or 31.2% of workers in South Africa find economic opportunities in the “informal economy,” often because there are fewer barriers (training, skills, regulation) to entering the sector. 

Informal workers comprise a diverse group who may work in the formal or informal economy. Precarity of employment is common among these workers, who include, for example, casual workers as well as owners of microbusinesses (such as street vending or Spaza shops). However, workers in temporary, part-time or on-call work arrangements may also fall within this category, depending on the circumstances.

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Climate Change and Health: Mobilizing Public International Law into Action

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This post launches a new Digital Symposium, Climate Change and Health: Mobilizing Public International Law into Action by Guest Editors Thalia Viveros Uehara and Alicia Ely Yamin. Check back for more posts twice a week!

The election of Donald J. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and in his prior administration pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, has sent shock waves through government and civil society leaders gathered at COP29. Argentina has walked away from the negotiations. Meanwhile, top leaders from the world’s largest polluting nations have not attended. COP29 was supposed to mobilize commitments to finance climate action as well as solidify the growing “health turn” within the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including WHO guidance on integrating health into Nationally Determined Contributions. But that progress seems now in jeopardy.

This digital symposium makes clear that stakes could not be higher for global health. Projections estimate that between 2030 and 2050, climate-related health impacts could lead to an additional 250,000 deaths per year, largely from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Furthermore, mental health conditions are worsening as extreme weather, livelihood losses, and wildfire smoke increase trauma.

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Abortion debt: revolutionary acts and reclamations of care

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Photo credit: Melisa Slep

by Rishita Nandagiri and Lucía Berro Pizzarossa

Discussions about abortion tend to be dominated by considerations pertaining to medicine (e.g., “safety”) and law (e.g., “legality”). Medication abortion — misoprostol alone or in combination with mifepristone — has dramatically shifted these discussions. Brazilian women used misoprostol to self-manage their abortions in the 1980s, galvanizing Latin American and transnational feminist efforts to share knowledge and organize access to pills. In 2005, these medicines were added to the WHO’s Essential Medicines List. Self-managed abortion (SMA), which includes self-sourcing of abortion pills, self-diagnosis, and management of abortion processes and post-abortion care outside formal health systems, unsettles traditional understandings of what an abortion is, where and how it can (or should) occur, who a provider is, and what a “safe” abortion is. 

In April 2024, Polish activists from Abortion Without Borders (AWB) invoiced the Sejm (Polish parliament) €11.5 million ($12.4 million) for the financial costs and reproductive labor associated with  providing abortion access, resources, and care for Polish residents. AWB, an initiative by nine feminist organizations working across multiple countries, was founded in 2019 to provide information, support, and funding for abortion in Poland, either via pills or travel for in-clinic care abroad. Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, which many describe as constituting a de facto ban on abortions. Ministry of Health statistics report Polish hospitals conducted only 161 abortions in 2022. In contrast, Polish non-governmental organizations estimate that, every year, 120,000-150,000 abortions are obtained via pills or procedurally. 

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Does History Matter?

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by Elena Caruso

While the exact definition of self-managed abortion remains blurred, it currently tends to refer to the end of a pregnancy through the autonomous administration of pills outside of a public health facility. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends self-management for pregnancies under 12 weeks, using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol (or misoprostol alone) and it includes both medications in its list of essential medicines. In its Abortion Care Guidelines, the WHO states that medication abortion has “revolutionized” access to abortion care, emphasizing the novelty of this method.  

While the origins of self-managed abortion with pills are not fully elucidated, it is generally accepted that this practice dates back to the second half of the 1980s in Brazil, when women discovered and disseminated the information that misoprostol (a medication legally available for the treatment of stomach and duodenal ulcers) could safely and effectively be used to prevent pregnancies. In the current debate on self-managed abortion, engagement with history is often limited to a few background sentences. This “ahistorical” approach can leave the impression that self-managed abortion lacks a significant and notable history. 

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