Climate change disproportionately impacts the world’s most vulnerable people, such as the old and the poor. Now, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has found that there is a large disparity between men and women when it comes to income loss caused by global warming.

Women and girls do three times the amount of unpaid care work and housework than men and boys, according to UN Women. But that’s just the first inequity. There’s another, hidden one, that involves climate change and environmental degradation.

Mental health challenges are associated with the effects of climate change, such as increasing temperatures, trauma from extreme events, and loss of livelihoods and culture. It’s not much of a leap to realize that women are going to face violence from men in such a pressure cooker.

A crucial but less discussed aspect is the role of democratic freedoms — free speech, assembly, and access to information — in shaping climate justice and solutions.

What do beauty products have to do with climate change? There’s the obvious answer: They are laden with petrochemicals that are produced from fossil fuels. But if you’re a woman of color, there’s a more insidious answer.

There was a lot of “calling for” this and that, with little in the way of financial or legal commitments for women suffering in the climate crisis. Even the “calling for” part was less than robust.

As COP 28 continues in Dubai, women have a larger role in the proceedings than ever: Women’s participation in national delegations to the UN COP climate conferences rose from 30 to 35 percent from 2012 to 2022, UN Women reports. Yet this week, the organization has released an alarming report on feminist climate justice.

Kenya’s Forest and Wildlife Services are carrying out brutal and forceful evictions of the indigenous Ogiek people from their homes in the Mau Forest, in the country’s Rift Valley.

On Tuesday, officials in Florida’s Miami-Dade County rejected a bill that would have created the first county-level workplace heat protections in the United States. In the face of our ever-increasing climate challenges, such regulations can save lives. But there are few laws in place around the world that protect people who work outdoors, let alone dedicated offices to protection from heat.

While the world is lagging in its promises to slow global warming, a new report finds that there is not only a problem with meeting goals set by the Paris Agreement, but that there is also major gap — between $194 billion and $366 billion per year — in the finances required to hit important climate targets.

In the remote Himalayan village of Pahalgam, Zubaida Begum, a resilient 45-year-old mother of three, faces a daily battle against nature’s capricious wrath. Living in a mountainous place where the elements can be unforgiving, she stands as a beacon of courage, safeguarding her family's survival in the rugged terrain.

When incomes decline, families become desperate. Marrying off their girls can be a step toward easing this despondency.

This week saw the Third March of Indigenous Women in Brasilia, Brazil. Its theme: “Women Biomes in Defense of Biodiversity Through Ancestral Roots.” Demonstrators took to the streets for women’s rights and to defend their right to Indigenous lands.

As the world comes off the hottest summer ever recorded, researchers are feverishly studying the devastating effects of heat on the body.

One terrible morning, after battling a relentless onslaught of ocean waves for years, Modupe Akerele’s waterfront home finally crumbled in submission to the sea. She was lucky to make it out alive.

What do a nail artist, a grandmother, and a pregnant woman have in common? They’re all influencers shilling for fossil fuel companies on social media.

The gender gap in climate change is real: Women are more likely to suffer its effects and less likely to have a seat at the policy table. But the gap is not just in these areas. It also exists in who cares more — and does more — about the climate crisis. And over and over, researchers have found that women are simply liable to care more and to take more action than men.

With the Women’s World Cup well underway, players from all over the world are settled in the host countries of Australia and New Zealand. But to get to these countries, most players had to take very long, and very polluting, flights.

Greta Thunberg has had a busy week. Just hours after leaving a court on Monday in Malmo, Sweden, where she was fined for disobeying police orders, the 20-year-old went right back to the streets to protest.

The end of June saw a deadly heatwave in India: At least 96 people died from scorching temperatures, which hit 113 in consecutive days, alongside high humidity.

In 2021, when a mining company began setting up camp in the iron-sand-rich Indonesian coastal village of Pasar Seluma with plans to start operations, the local women agreed that they’d be leading the protests this time around.

As the world struggles to catch up with climate change — whether confronting extreme wildfire smoke in the U.S. Northeast, or some of the hottest temperatures on record in Pakistan — each country must grapple with its own particular issues.

With questions about the ethics of Supreme Court justices littering the news over their acceptance of free vacations and more from wealthy Republican donors, comes a new revelation that puts one justice — and his wife — in the crosshairs.

Fewer than one in five landholders in the world are women, but women make up about half the farmers in low-income countries.

Oftentimes, countries will arrest land defenders on made-up charges that don’t actually have to do with their activism. That is what is happening in Vietnam, where a leading climate activist named Hoang Thi Minh has been imprisoned on false charges of tax evasion.

Guyana, at the top of South America, is one of the poorest countries on the continent. It is also particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, heavy rainfall, and hurricanes since most of the population lives on its coast, which, in some places, can lie as low as 7 feet below sea level.

Extreme heat is hard on the body. It can cause everything from confusion to seizures, let alone serious discomfort. Add a blackout to an ongoing heat wave — so no a/c — and everything gets worse.

Violet Gatensby, a Tlingit artist from Carcross, in Canada’s Yukon territory, startled a room of delegates from First Nations of the Pacific Coast at an Indigenous leadership summit on Lummi territory in Ferndale, Wash., this past week.

In the 20^th century, Oakland, Calif., was shaped by the nefarious policies of urban planners and politicians. Mayor Sheng Thao, the country’s first Hmong American mayor of a large city, has promised to “reverse decades of environmental racism” by implementing a Green New Deal for the city.

Yesterday was a landmark day for environmental justice in the United States. Advocates for the environment have long highlighted that communities of color experience a disproportionate amount of suffering from the climate crisis yet receive the least help from the government.

The climate crisis is destroying lives, homes, and livelihoods, but its impacts are unequal, harming some populations and regions with far greater severity than others. Shockingly, 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women and girls, according to UN Environment.

Ecofeminism is defined by academics as a mix of political activism and intellectual critique that takes on traditionally harmful systems within both gender dynamics and the environment. It sounds complex, and it is. But its core principles are clear.

At the 2021 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that Canada “would take a leadership role in the fight against climate change.”

It’s not often you hear the word “vampiric” coming out of a U.N. secretary-general’s mouth. But on Wednesday, Secretary-General António Guterres said at the U.N. Water Conference in New York that countries “are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use” of water. Lengthy droughts are also wreaking havoc.

As countries continue to innovate ways to battle climate change, there is a new, related “slimy arms race” afoot. (Credit to The New York Times for the “slimy arms race” phrasing.) It seems that seaweed, in all its slippery glory, is a multifaceted, under-tapped, and potentially powerful weapon that can be used a number of ways in the ongoing fight to slow or stop global warming.

Khambampati Rama Devi mixes cow dung, cow urine, soil, and jaggery, creating a mixture called jeevamrutam. She then sprays the brown concoction on her cotton crop.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, countless numbers have been forcibly taken to Russia, and nearly 1,600 Ukrainian cultural sites and churches have been purposefully destroyed. But there is another potentially catastrophic fallout from the war that is less talked about.

Dr. Robert Bullard, one of the founders of the environmental justice movement in this country, wrote in his 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie, that “white racism … has made it easier for Black residential areas to become the dumping grounds for all types of life-threatening toxins and industrial pollution.”

Global warming is melting the world’s glaciers. We’ve been hearing about this for a while. But what we haven’t been hearing about is the human cost of the dissolving of glaciers. A study out this week in the journal Nature Communications says that 15 million people are under threat globally from flooding caused by overflowing glacial lakes.

The village where Nunung, 48, lives has been her home ever since she was a baby. But much has changed since she was a little girl, including the dangerous shrinking of the nearby beach, which has been subsumed by the Indian Ocean by as much as 33 yards since 2011 — threatening the adjacent homes.

Natural disasters can and do cause deaths, but the disabled community suffers disproportionately, with researchers estimating that people with disabilities are up to four times more likely to die in floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and other climate-related events.

As the world suffered through record heat waves in 2022, the Middle East saw extreme temperatures rarely witnessed in history. Foreign laborers must withstand the oppressive heat for endless hours at a time — and with that exposure comes damage to their bodies, one type of which is now being identified as the root of a life-threatening disease.

COP27, the comprehensive U.N. conference on climate change in November, got a lot of attention. But in December, there was a lesser-known U.N. climate-related This one not only made strides toward preserving the natural world, it was also a landmark moment for women in the climate movement.

The Environmental Protection Agency is set to solidify a ruling that will cut down on the smog produced by heavy vehicles. But those deep in the fight to save the planet say that not only does the ruling not go far enough.

It’s been about a month since the United Nations climate conference began in Egypt. Called COP27, the annual forum was a chance to address an increasingly clear red alert for our planet.

Homesteads in rural Zimbabwe used to be surrounded by lush green vegetation, but years of climate-change-related drought has turned the landscape into a deadly brown tinderbox.

At COP27, the UN climate conference in Egypt, which ends today, it appears to have been same old, same old when it comes to inclusion.

Coca-Cola is far and away the biggest polluter of plastics in the world. So why is it one of the sponsors of the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, known as COP27? The answer is insidious, and, unfortunately, this is not the only shady corporate-climate confluence happening this month in Sharm El-Sheikh.

It’s true: The majority of people only read the headline, not the story. There have been a couple studies in recent years that show that only three or four people bother to read an article before sharing it on social media. Which is why it was so alarming to read the New York Times’s morning email the other day.

When it comes to the materials needed to keep our electronics going, there is often a hidden cost.

In the past 10 years, an environmental activist somewhere in the world was killed every two days. In 2021, three-quarters of such murders were perpetrated in Central America. The perpetrators have been mainly organized criminal groups and governments that want to destroy land for profit, such as through mining, logging, and extractive industries like oil and gas.

While the world watched in horror as Hurricane Fiona ravaged Puerto Rico and Bermuda this week, it was easy to miss another climate-related emergency. This one is not due to a single massive event, like a hurricane. Instead, it is an ongoing, worsening crisis, one which is devastating Central America.

The jury is out on whether coronavirus has spread more widely than it may have if the world were not undergoing climate change. It is not, however, when it comes to a rise in infectious diseases overall.

Just as the court has paved the way for states to deny essential reproductive health care, it has also cemented the country’s position as one of the biggest contributors to climate change in the world. The two cases are more connected than you may think.

Among the horrors of the climate crisis is drought. In Somalia, in particular, it’s become too dry to grow crops, sustain livestock, or find fresh drinking water.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the people involved in that onslaught have found their ways into positions in which they can “legally” make decisions about the Amazon’s precious trees and fauna.

There is now evidence that can be used by countries who want to sue the heaviest polluters in the world: the United States, China, Brazil, Russia, and India.

In 2019, a Nepali woman named Kanchhi Maya Tamang used her climb of Mount Everest to spread awareness about climate change. Her reasoning: “When we speak from the top of the world, our voices can be heard louder,” said Tamang, 31, who has summited Everest three times.

Because extractive industries are generally located in communities with the least power to fight their existence, people who live in areas mostly composed of indigenous people and people of color, among others, are poised to be hit hardest by a new reduction of environmental regulatory authority.

Throughout the Caribbean, from Jamaica to Dominica, developing island countries are suffering the misery of climate change, and they are doing so disproportionately to wealthy nations.

Climate change and inequality are locked in a perverse loop: Impoverished areas are home to pollutive NIMBY industries that release the gases that lead to more climate change, which in turn adversely affects these communities more than any other.

Before Peyton Gendron, 18, allegedly shot and killed 10 people in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket on Saturday, he posted a 180-page screed with the clear intention of killing “as many Blacks as possible.” But lesser publicized has been the fact that Gendron identified himself as an “ecofascist,” meaning he thinks people of color are taking up too much space on the planet, thus ruining the environment — and degrading his race.

“Hurricanes don’t care if you’re rich, poor, white or black — but that doesn’t mean that every person is equally vulnerable to a storm.”

The future of climate change is here. Or at least it’s here if you’re in India. Or Pakistan.

It’s Earth Day 2022. Since President Biden took office last year, the United States has had its first-ever climate czar in John Kerry, and an administration working to put back together the shattered pieces of the environmental Humpty Dumpty that Trump shoved off the wall.

There is perhaps no starker a picture of how incredibly environmentally reckless — or ignorant — Russian troops have been as they attack Ukraine.

The argument against single-use plastic products neglects to consider people with disabilities, for whom reusable products can be too difficult to navigate.

There has been a lot of talk in the fight against climate change about focusing on reducing emissions in the most pollutive countries, like China, the United States, and India. But a new report says we’re concentrating on the wrong thing. We should, researchers say, be looking instead at the most pollutive people.

We’ve been hearing for a number of years now about the disastrous melting of the polar ice caps. The warming oceans. But there is one part of the world that may affect the speed of climate change sooner than any of these other nightmarish issues, even while it is a place that still appears lush and relatively healthy: the Amazon rainforest.

Last year, President Biden pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half of 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Of course, this didn’t make the fossil fuel industry happy. But the march toward cleaner energy appears inevitable, as natural gas takes the place of coal, and wind and solar energy production ramps up to replace all fossil fuels.

The past few years have brought some of the worst wildfires the world has ever seen. Between the United States, Australia, and Siberia, fires have eaten up millions of acres of land. Siberia’s 2021 fires alone burned more than all the others around the world combined, destroying more than 21 million acres of boreal forest — an area about the size of Serbia.

With the pandemic insanity of the last couple of years, you may have missed a controversy that toppled the head of the Sierra Club last summer.

About 21 million people live in Mumbai, India. Between 2 and 3 million of them live within a half a mile from the Arabian Sea. And climate scientists predict that 80 percent of the land they live on may be under water by 2050 due to global warming.

What do you do when your once-dry village suddenly turns into an island? When your only source of fresh drinking water disappears, and dangerous snakes, alligators, and hippos unexpectedly live too close for comfort?

Haenyeo — female divers in South Korea — clad in wetsuits and occasionally pink-ringed eye masks, free-dive without oxygen for a minute at a time, hoping to harvest sea cucumbers, conchs, and abalones.

Everyone is affected by climate change. But some people — who are already less visible than others — are at greater risk of harm than most. People with disabilities face different and more intense challenges than non-disabled people in the face of events like extreme heat, wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts.

The exclusion of indigenous people underscores white privilege within the climate movement.

A 65-year-old woman who goes by just her first name, Mayawati, is one of the indigenous women leading a nearly 200-mile march to protest the opening of more coal mines in the forest of Hasdeo Arand, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

There are more than 190 countries in the world — the number varies depending on who you ask. Another statistic, more widely agreed upon, is that the United States has, cumulatively, emitted more than 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions since 1750, a hefty share.

Scientists call what is happening in poorly planned neighborhoods the “urban heat island effect.” The islands mainly affect people who live with less green space and fewer large bodies of water like lakes, both of which absorb heat and cool off residents

Many people from developing countries did not make it to the U.K. because of inequality — the ubiquitous kind of inequality that leaves poor people behind when it comes to the climate crisis, health outcomes, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

The work of people not in the political spotlight will be the critical element upon which global deciders will adopt measures that may save the future of our planet.

We talk a lot about carbon dioxide when we talk about climate change. But, in reality, methane is a much more active contributor to global warming. While less ubiquitous in the atmosphere, methane is more effective at trapping radiation.

On Saturday, Daniella Flanagan rallied for reproductive rights in downtown Houston along with more than 10,000 others when the skies opened. Relentless, heavy rain poured down.

If you’ve ever been in New York City during the September convening of the UN General Assembly, you know that there are alt-events ringing the Secretariat throughout Midtown’s tony East Side. Everything from corruption to global health to sustainable agriculture — any human rights issue you can think of usually has at least one panel, if not a dozen.

It’s been just four years since President Trump chucked paper towels at survivors of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, but the act left an enduring image of the president’s callousness to people suffering in the storm’s aftermath.

As Hurricane Ida rips its way through the country’s Southeast — on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, no less — newscasters across America are referring to the storm as a “she.” Not odd, considering the name. But behind that single pronoun is a fascinatingly sexist history.

With fears ramping up about the fate of women and girls in Afghanistan now under Taliban rule, climate change likely seems very far from related to the outcome. But it isn’t.

A thick, slimy substance known as “sea snot” began blanketing Turkey’s Marmara Sea at the end of last year. The smelly coating intensified on the coastline in May.

Wherever you are in the U.S, you’re likely experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, or drought. As of Aug. 3, 40 percent of the U.S. was under drought conditions, and 2021 is looking like it may end up being one of the driest years in a millennium. And, as of today, the wildfires have burned 2,063,146 acres of land. But while that’s bad news, here’s the really bad news.

As someone who just decamped from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, you could probably call me a climate refugee.

New York City is in the middle of an air-quality alert because of the massive wildfires out West and in Canada. Of course, what we’re experiencing here is nothing next to what those in the direct areas of the fires are feeling. But it’s not insignificant if you’re elderly, pregnant, have existing health issues, or are a child.

After Kandakam Mogulamma’s husband, a farmer, passed away in 2019, she quickly learned how to grow crops.

Dahabo Mahdi, 32, is ploughing a small cornfield she shares with her in-laws in Jiro, a village in central Somalia. She only moved there recently. She was forced to.

During this pandemic year (which, really, is nearing a year and a half), the world became cleaner: Dolphins swam the canals of Venice! Blue skies lit up normally smoggy Shanghai! Pumas wandered the streets of Santiago!

A luscious, green canopy outlines Cauca, a mountainous municipality in southwestern Colombia. These biodiverse forests are under threat from the damaging impact of narcotrafficking, and so are the indigenous people defending them. For environmentalist and politician Sandra Liliana Peña Chocué, the price of defending this indigenous territory was her life.

Now that we’re past the first 100 days, can Biden sustain his a blistering pace in his fight against climate change?

Greta Thunberg quickly became a leading voice in contemporary climate activism, despite her young age and non-elite status. But even with her popularity and success, some argue that she has become both a hero and a villain.

When Padma Thinles was 11 years old, he lived in a city called Leh, in the northern Indian territory of Ladakh, on the Western side of the Himalayas. Then, it was a small village with streams brimming with freshwater. Now, “forget the streams,” said Thinles, who is now 21 and still lives in the region.

In Chisapani, Ramechhap district, a remote corner in eastern Nepal, the snow-fed Tamakoshi River cascades down the Manthali valley, but residents in upstream villages pray for a few drops of rain. Scorching heat has turned these high hills into a barren landscape.

These plants are traditionally used to alleviate nearly 300 types of diseases — everything from stomach ailments to heart problems.

While precise figures are not known and are vastly underreported, a 2018 study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than other American women.

When the rains came in January 2020, and again in February (albeit in less of a deluge), Foluke Afolabi was concerned about her farm in Ikorodu, in Nigeria’s southwestern Lagos State.

When Zohra Sansa, 21, returned to Kabul, Afghanistan, after nine years in Iran as a refugee, she witnessed some of climate change’s catastrophic effects in crowded internally displaced persons camps filled with homeless, rural families.

The little boys are having a blast, and their giggles are infectious. Clad only in shorts, they’re rolling in the sand, which coats them like sugar on a powdered donut. When they reach the water’s edge, they roll in and rinse off. Roll. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a good game.

At 20 degrees Fahrenheit, Misra Begum, 35, a mother of three, sits beside a small lake in the northern Indian village of Naranag and washes a bucket of clothes in the freezing water. Two of her children are beside her.

Burst water pipes, flooding, and power outages at domestic violence shelters in Texas displaced hundreds of survivors during mid-February’s aberrant winter weather. At one particular shelter in Dallas, The Lily reported, 123 women and children were evacuated to a nearby church, causing more upheaval in their already difficult lives.

Sandra Matanda’s day normally starts at around 4 a.m. and ends at nearly midnight. She is a government employee in Zimbabwe’s eastern border city of Mutare. With her monthly salary of less than $200, Matanda, a 36-year-old single mother, cannot afford gas for cooking.

Use our climate map to investigate the impact of climate change across the world on those it affects most: women, people of color, and indigenous and LGBTQ people.

Jane Fonda's call to action: There is still time for us to act to minimize the impact of the climate crisis. According to the U.S. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance with every half degree of warming we either enable or avoid.

Poor countries often have broken governments, shoddy infrastructure, and few systems in place to help when there is a mass crisis — which is why the U.N. Development Program found that there is a severe difference in how people are harmed during a climate disaster, depending on whether they live in a developing or rich country.

A hurricane hits. The terror and stress caused by the imposing wind and rain affect nearly everybody’s mental health, but perhaps none more so than expectant mothers. Then that stress and the pollutants whipped up by the storm wreak havoc on their bodies, and their pregnancies.