"We need low-cost ways to come together now, in the wake of funding cuts, even though the issues are as urgent as ever," Ashley Wolfington, a veteran of international development, told CG.
The world's toughest challenges rarely fit into tidy boxes, one at a time. Now, a group of development professionals tackling climate change, humanitarian crises, and sexual and reproductive health and rights — or SRHR — have launched an online community to bring those big challenges and even bigger solutions together.
The SRHR, Humanitarian Crises, and Climate Action Community of Practice is an open forum available as a LinkedIn group where members can start important conversations, share information and resources, and surface emerging challenges and innovations. The genesis for the community of practice — or COP — was sparked in Bogotá, Colombia, last November in the lead-up to the International Conference on Family Planning.
"Our Hotspots preconference in Bogotá made clear that humanitarian and climate experts had a huge appetite to collaborate but no single place to come together. We also knew that sustaining that dialogue had to be easy," Ashley Wolfington, a co-chair for the conference's Humanitarian and Crisis Setting section and one of the COP moderators, told CG via email. "We created this community of practice to be a low-stakes space to keep talking, share what we're reading, and stay connected to what others are working on."
Amid historic cuts to global aid and a fractured development landscape, the public health community is embracing resourceful, decentralized, community-engaged efforts to address a broad and growing range of global systems, financing mechanisms, and service delivery needs.
"We need low-cost ways to come together now, in the wake of funding cuts, even though the issues are as urgent as ever," Wolfington said. "Often, the humanitarian practitioners and the climate adaptation experts are working toward the same goals but might only connect once a year at a conference like the International Conference on Family Planning.”
As climate shocks, displacements, and protracted crises increasingly overlap, compound, and threaten access to essential sexual and reproductive health services, siloed approaches fail to meet needs on the ground. Harnessing interconnectedness is at the core of embedding SRHR within emergency funding and disaster planning as well as within climate action plans.
Stronger collaboration across climate, health, gender, and humanitarian sectors is essential. And online communities of practice offer one model for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and collective learning across traditionally separate fields.
"This COP bridges the divide between well-aligned areas of work and reinforces the fact that climate change and disasters are exacerbating ongoing humanitarian crises," said Sono Aibe, a global consultant in climate, gender, and health and an early COP member.
While its long-term influence has yet to unfold, the COP could signal real momentum toward collective learning and is open for new members.
Gracie Leavitt contributed to the editing of this article.
"Pollution and climate shifts make the regular stressors more extreme and add new stressors," Jamie DeWitt, a study co-author and Director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research at Oregon State University, told CG.
The research involved trial participants in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guatemala.
"Reported user feedback includes easier insertion, less dryness on removal, and strong overall comfort," Vyld co-founder Melanie Schichan told CG.
Litigation on the matter is set to continue in the lower courts and could return to the Supreme Court down the line. But, for now, telemedicine, mail delivery, and pharmacy dispensing of the medication — which can be used to end a pregnancy — can continue where it is otherwise legal.
