Extreme heat is putting pregnant women and newborns at growing risk, with climate-driven heat increasingly linked to complications during pregnancy and childbirth, UN climate chief Simon Stiell is expected to warn.
Speaking at the pre-COP summit in Nadi, Fiji, Stiell will cite a new survey showing that more than two-thirds of health professionals across five continents had seen complications caused by intense heat over the past five years.
‘Rising temperatures mean rising danger in pregnancy,’ he is expected to say.
‘Climate-driven extreme heat during pregnancy is increasingly linked to premature birth, stillbirth, low birth weight, and maternal complications.’
Health professionals report heat-related complications
Scientists have warned that climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and causing heat records to be broken more frequently.
Around 33 countries, stretching from western Europe to the Sahel and Central America, recorded their hottest July since records began this year, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Union’s Copernicus climate observatory.
The survey of 1,000 midwives and doctors in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Brazil and Zimbabwe was commissioned by charitable foundation Wellcome.
The survey found that nearly all the midwives and doctors had cared for mothers or babies suffering the effects of extreme heat.
About a third of respondents said they had seen cases of low birth weight or restricted growth, feeding difficulties, and dehydration or heat-related illness that they believed were caused by extreme heat.
Calls for action on climate risks
Stiell is expected to warn that pregnancy and birth are becoming a new faultline in the global climate crisis.
‘The picture is clear and very disturbing: as extreme heat worsens, pregnancy and birth are now a new faultline in the global climate crisis, and one which is potentially fatal,’ he will say.
‘This faultline must not become another deep chasm of climate-driven suffering, inequality and injustice.’
Wellcome chairwoman and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard said mothers and babies were facing increasing risks as a result of climate change.
‘Extreme heat is an invisible killer, but pregnant women must not be invisible. Leaders have the evidence and solutions they need – now they must act,’ she said.
Stiell will tell pre-COP delegates that ‘pregnancy should be a time of hope’.
‘But for millions, it is becoming a time of anxiety, as climate impacts fill everyday life with risk.’
The pre-COP31 summit in Fiji and the remote coral atoll of Tuvalu is being seen by Pacific leaders as an opportunity to draw attention to communities on the frontline of climate change.
It is a precursor to the larger UN-sponsored global climate summit, known as COP31, which will be held next month in Turkey.
