"Climate justice and social injustice are completely interlinked," said Isabel González Whitaker of Moms Clean Air Force during a virtual event focused largely on the actions of federal agents across the U.S. targeting immigrants and others.
There's a whole lot going on around the world: This weekly brief from Climate, Gendered isn't intended to be exhaustive but rather your chance to spend just a few moments on a handful of items with the potential to disproportionately impact over half the global population — plus, the ideas that might make a difference.
Last week, CG covered how a major winter storm, set to impact infrastructure throughout much of the United States and Texas in particular, could disrupt abortion access. This week, infant formula company Bobbie shared about how it reached out to customers in the state ahead of the storm. Concerned that extreme weather might roil supply chains, the company said it contacted customers expecting subscription-based deliveries with an offer to move up shipment dates in advance of the heavy snow and ice. Bobbie said 700 customers accepted the offer.
Globally, organizations like PAI say they are working to strengthen supply chains in the face of climate-related disasters to help people access the sexual and reproductive health care they need — from menstrual products to contraception and maternal care. In a world of supercharged storms, successive flooding events, and more, advocates and policymakers have also called for SRH needs to be more meaningfully incorporated into official disaster preparedness plans.
CG asked men's health, masculinity, and behavior change expert Dominick Shattuck for his take on a study showing that some men may minimize climate crisis concerns to avoid appearing feminine. Shattuck first spoke with CG about how fostering environments where it feels socially safe to share these concerns could help. He has since gone on to expand on his thoughts in a blog post.
In a follow-up on the potential environmental impacts of sexualized deepfakes and the data centers that enable them, CG's January 22 digest noted that Microsoft had pledged in early 2026 to "minimize [its] water use and replenish more of your water than we use." The New York Times reported this week that Microsoft "expects to use about 18 billion liters of water in 2030, up 150 percent from 2020" with "water use ... expected to be particularly significant in areas already facing water crises."
If the U.S. took over resource-rich Greenland? "Paid maternity leave, gone. Free abortion, gone. Free birth control, medicine, etc., gone. Safety on the streets for women ... also gone," Tillie Martinussen worries. In conversation with CG this week, the former member of Greenland's parliament discussed how a push for positioning and natural resources — from fossil fuels to rare earth elements — could end up impacting the lives of Indigenous women and girls as well as the whole autonomous territory.
Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, convened a virtual conversation on January 26 that focused largely on the actions of federal agents across the U.S. targeting immigrants and other residents for detention, deportation, and more. Among the speakers was Isabel González Whitaker of Moms Clean Air Force, an advocacy group that aims to fight air pollution while championing maternal and child health. "Connect the dots for us between climate change and the people being targeted by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], particularly Latinos," Saujani posed to González Whitaker. The environmental advocate went on to discuss how climate-driven disasters are set to displace huge populations living just about everywhere in the future, suggesting that a human rights issue of this scale calls for meaningful, compassionate protections.
"Climate justice and social injustice are completely interlinked," González Whitaker said. "Specific to what we're seeing right now is this idea that global migration is some sort of anomaly when it's been around since time immemorial. And it's only going to get worse, and climate change is one of the root causes of that."
As mass displacements linked to rising temperatures increasingly threaten vulnerable communities around the world, including in the U.S., organizations have called for rights-based mechanisms to address the crisis. These could include international agreements on refugee protections, global transition away from the fossil fuels that supercharge storms and rising seas, and even the passage of the Climate Displaced Persons Act, first introduced in the U.S. Congress in 2019.
"I think I read a statistic recently that in 2020, 10 million children globally were displaced because of extreme weather events," González Whitaker said during the virtual event. She went on to note that around 100 million children may be set to be displaced by extreme weather over the next three decades, according to a 2023 United Nations Children's Fund report cited by the Associated Press. The UNICEF report called for "ensuring child-critical services are shock-responsive, portable, and inclusive."
González Whitaker said of Moms Clean Air Force, "We're very much here to add to the chorus of compassion as it relates to these communities that are being targeted, my community that's being targeted." She concluded, "These are not siloed issues."
Over 640,000 people have been impacted by historic floodwaters in Mozambique since January 7, according to the BBC, which described the weather event as "the worst flooding in a generation." As the Inkomati River overflowed, inundating homes and making roads impassable, many residents took shelter in school buildings and other temporary accommodations. Human Rights Watch senior researcher Zenaida Machado told CG that her visits to the overcrowded evacuation centers, "hosting predominantly women and children," revealed critical shortages in essential supplies. But her HRW report, which estimated that at least 11,000 of the displaced population are pregnant people, identified a decades-old women's rights mechanism as a tool for improving not only recovery efforts but also disaster preparedness and response.
"Authorities have relocated people from flooded areas to these sites without ensuring minimum reception conditions," Machado said, pointing to a lack of safe drinking water, food, and hygiene items. Moreover, she noted, "These conditions heighten protection risks, particularly for women and girls, and exacerbate the likelihood of gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse."
To address these serious concerns, Machado has called on officials to respect the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, commonly known as the Maputo Protocol for its 2003 adoption in the capital of Mozambique. The instrument, legally binding on all countries that ratify it, "seeks to guarantee extensive rights to all African women and girl citizens," according to the U.N. Development Programme's Africa Bureau.
Amnesty International reported in August 2025 that 46 of the 55 African Union member countries had ratified the protocol. But Machado told CG that it has been implemented "unevenly," noting that, specifically in Mozambique, the frequency of disasters has prevented officials from fully meeting the protocol's requirements in times of crisis.
"However, these constraints do not diminish the State's obligations to prioritize the safety, health, and dignity of women and girls, nor its responsibility to coordinate available national and international support," the senior researcher said.
Meanwhile, the implementation shortcomings identified by Machado might also point to a solution to under-resourced, under-staffed efforts.
"Women's participation in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery continues to be marginal," she said. "Women are too often relegated to low-status or 'small' tasks, while their representation in senior leadership, policy and decision-making spaces, and in financial and resource-allocation processes remains minimal."
But if women were equitably represented in these roles and spaces? Residents could expect not only more gender-sensitive efforts but also more, period — for everyone. It's an outcome also supported by 2024's Sendai Gender Action Plan to mitigate gender discrimination and inequality in disaster settings, according to the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Three months to the day that Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica, the organization that helped bring the four-part reproductive justice framework to life cited the paradigm in its January 28 announcement of a donation drive. "In reflection of the Reproductive Justice tenet that all people have the right to raise their children in safe and sustainable communities, SisterSong is mobilizing a supplies drive in support of the people of Jamaica," the Atlanta, Georgia-based organization posted on social media, seeking donations that reflect the RJ framework and the ongoing impacts of the devastating storm.
The announcement called for contributions of unopened items, including menstrual products, emergency contraception, pregnancy tests, prenatal vitamins, breast pumps, infant formula, and diapers. The range of products reflects the full range of the RJ framework, which spans the rights to bodily autonomy, to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in safe environments.
Meanwhile, the need to sustain these efforts months after the storm reflects the lasting impacts of a hurricane intensified by climate change. A mid-December report from the U.N. estimated that over 625,000 people in the region had been affected, with 120,000 buildings roofless following hazardous winds and between $8 billion and $15 billion in economic damages overall. As of late 2025, 90 emergency shelters were still in operation.
Such numbers may not tell the whole story, but they can be crucial in informing effective recovery measures. In November, Isiuwa Iyahen of the U.N. Women Multi-Country Office for the Caribbean told the Jamaica Observer that data collection regarding women affected by Melissa was required to ensure their needs could be addressed in the aftermath. Accurate and complete data can help to shape longer-term support too.
Those in or near Atlanta are invited to drop off donation items in person through February 10. SisterSong also invited people to share and amplify their call to action.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance announced during last Friday's anti-abortion March for Life that the Trump administration would be expanding the so-called Mexico City Policy. Commonly known as the Global Gag Rule, the measure has been primarily used, since being enacted in 1984, to prevent organizations that receive U.S tax dollars from providing, promoting, or discussing abortion. The expansion of the policy is set to "extend that prohibition to include 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' and 'gender ideology,'" according to the New York Times, which reported on the matter based on an anonymous source within the administration. Now, nonpartisan health policy organization KFF tells CG, the newly expanded rule could also impact funding at the intersection of gender and climate — but KFF's Kellie Moss cautions organizations not to fall victim to the policy's "chilling effect."
During a virtual event hosted by KFF on January 28, Jen Kates, a senior vice president and director of global and public health policy at the org, noted that previous studies have shown the rule, prior to its expansion, had already been associated with increased rates of abortion, increased pregnancy, decreased contraceptive prevalence, and reduced service integration.
"I think that's important because generally in global health there's been a movement to integrate services much more deliberately because … [people] don't have to go to different silos of services," Kates said during the event.
Service integration might, for example, look like improving access to a full range of essential items by enabling disaster-impacted residents to pick up, say, food staples and emergency contraception in one go or from the same location. "But this kind of policy really cuts against integration," Kates said, suggesting that marrying Gag Rule-limited activities with other vital efforts could imperil funding for those efforts as well. Even before its expansion, it seems, the policy may have posed some challenges for streamlining certain gender-sensitive disaster response.
After the virtual event, CG asked KFF whether the expanded policy might impact projects at the intersection of gender and climate specifically — such as those working to meet the needs of transgender individuals in the wake of extreme weather events.
"It's hard to answer in the abstract," Moss, an associate director with KFF's Global and Public Health Policy program, said, "but if an organization received foreign aid from the U.S. and carried out gender-related activities that would be considered prohibited, it would either have to stop performing or promoting those activities or stop taking U.S. support. To the extent that those activities were integrated with climate work, the climate work would be affected in either scenario."
Importantly, Moss cautioned during the virtual event against organizations playing into the Gag Rule's "chilling effect" — wherein people sometimes self-censor or curtail their actions out of fear or speculation.
"This is where the impact that has been documented in the past of overimplementation and the chilling effect is really expressed … when people don't fully understand the broadness of a new policy and the finer details of how to implement it," Moss said during the event. "Don't assume something just because something is vague. Try to find out the details."
One goal at Climate, Gendered is to bring a spotlight to the reality that proliferating pollution, increasing temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather, habitat loss, and more can uniquely and disproportionately impact girls, women, trans communities, and non-binary people — especially those from communities of color, Indigenous people, disabled people, immigrants and displaced people, people experiencing poverty, and residents of low- and middle-income countries. We're also interested in the climate crises and concerns that can disproportionately affect men and boys.
This work cannot be done alone or in silos. We welcome with gratitude your feedback and observations. And please feel encouraged to share one way you noticed this week that climate and gender connect — and share CG with a friend.
"We stress the importance of including and recognizing the voices of women leaders as key actors within their communities," said Catalina Vargas, CARE's country director in Colombia, which borders Venezuela, in a statement to CG.
"Abortion care must be explicitly included in climate and disaster response frameworks as a core health service," researchers Tamara Fetters of Ipas and Ruvani Jayaweera of Ibis Reproductive Health told CG.
"Using the Earth's resources to power tools that facilitate violence against women is a clear case of environmental and social injustice," Brionté McCorkle, executive director of Georgia Conservation Voters, told CG.
"The world is waiting for the ideas generated by young women of the Himalayas," wrote scientists Durgesh Pant and Darshana Joshi in an op-ed published in the Garhwal Post.
