STRATEGY GUIDANCE
01 Assess the climate risks within your existing portfolio
This reflection and assessment process should help you understand:
How climate change poses a risk to SRHR outcomes in your focus geographies, and who bears the greatest burden relative to their adaptive capacity
How climate change impacts are expected to compound and intensify over time and what new impacts are predicted to emerge in the next 5-15 years
Which strategies (formal or informal) your partner communities are already using to adapt to the health impacts of climate change
Although much of this rapid risk assessment process can be done via desk research, your understanding of risks and opportunities will be stronger if you also consult internal and external stakeholders, given that the landscape of climate impacts and climate investments is changing very quickly.
Identify current and projected climate trends in your focal geographies
Key Questions
What climate hazards and stresses are happening now in your region of focus? (Consider the full scope of impacts– not just health and SRHR)
How are those current hazards projected to change over the next 5, 10, and 15 years — and beyond?
Are there new hazards that may emerge within those time windows? (e.g., new infectious diseases)
Considerations
Key direct impacts of climate change to consider include: average surface temperature, amount of precipitation, aridity/humidity changes, occurrence of flooding, groundwater salinity (if in coastal area), wildfires, extreme storm events, landslides, ocean acidification, and species loss
The greater the diversity of the terrain/ecology in your focal geography, the greater the diversity of climate impacts you’ll need to consider:
SRHR threats in a coastal plain might include new vector-borne diseases (e.g., Zika) and saltwater intrusion into groundwater.
Threats in a mountainous area might be declining agricultural yields due to changing precipitation with accompanying increases in malnutrition for pregnant women, or storm-fueled landslides destroying health facilities and road access.
Anticipating the projected, intensifying downstream impacts of climate change is crucial to developing a proactive, climate-informed SRHR investment strategy.
Useful Resources for Understanding Climate Risks
Regional: IPCC’s Atlas of Global and Regional Climate Projections
Country-level:
Country ministries
Sub-national: National ministry data such as climate impact and adaptation assessments
City, town, or community-level: Populous cities may have a city-level climate impact assessment and adaptation plan. For smaller/rural communities, consider a rapid vulnerability and capacity assessment and/or community consultations.
Map how those climate hazards affect SRHR access and outcomes
Key Questions
What are the current and projected impacts of climate change on SRHR (direct and indirect)?
Considerations
Refer to the Case Studies of Climate Impacts to get ideas of what SRHR impacts might be happening as a result of the climate hazards present in your focal region.
Consult with your existing grantees and partners to hear what they are hearing, seeing, and experiencing.
Remember that due to the siloing of health and climate sectors, grantee partners focused on SRHR might not see or understand the linkages between new or worsening negative SRHR outcomes and climate change in their regions. When consulting with existing grantee partners, this process may need to start with the basics of helping health actors see the linkages where they didn’t see them before.
Identifying future threats based on evidence and beginning to invest early is key to avoiding falling into a reactive funding approach.
If reliable data do not exist for your region, you may consider strategically investing in a rapid situational analysis to gather gender-disaggregated data on how people in this region are and could be impacted by climate change, and to what degree women and men are differently impacted by climate change.
Consider your focal population’s vulnerability factors and adaptation capacities
Key Questions
What are some of the factors that hinder people, particularly women and girls, in this region from being able to effectively adapt to the impacts of climate change? (For example: cultural norms, gender expectations, literacy rates, land ownership laws)
Within your geograph(ies) of focus, which populations are bearing the heaviest negative burdens of climate change, relative to their adaptive capacity?
Are there particular groups whose SRHR is especially impacted?
What strategies (formal or informal) are women and girls in your focal region already using to adapt to the impacts of climate change on their SRHR?
Considerations
Climate change is a “threat multiplier,” meaning that it amplifies and compounds existing vulnerabilities, social inequalities, and weaknesses in a health system.
In general, women and girls bear disproportionate impact and have lower adaptive capacity due to social inequalities such as access to capital, literacy, and bodily autonomy. However, a person’s gender interacts with other social-demographic factors. For example, women living in poverty from rural areas in LMIC are often considered among the most vulnerable to climate change.
Understanding what limits a household’s ability to adapt and recover from the impacts of climate change is key when considering what pathways towards resilience are feasible and necessary.
If you have specific SRHR outcomes of interest (e.g., reducing unintended pregnancies or reducing infant mortality), consider how climate change may disproportionately shift the burden of those threats to particular populations in your focal geographies (e.g., young women who are forced to migrate).
If women and girls are already experiencing impacts, it’s very likely that they are also already figuring out ways to adapt, within the constraints they face and with the resources that they have. They might not explicitly think about their solutions as “climate resilience,” but rather simply as strategies to survive and maintain bodily autonomy and dignity amid new challenges.
If you aren’t sure or don’t have any insight on this, it’s an opportunity to invest in some light exploratory work with local women’s groups to identify their concerns, hear their vision for the future, and understand their proposed solutions. One of the key roles of funders is to elevate and enable the locally-led and locally-adapted solutions that women and girls are already doing or wish to pursue.
Taking time to gather ground-level input and centering women’s ideas and vision also helps ensure that women and girls aren't treated only as vulnerable victims, but as powerful agents of change and resilience.
