Extreme heat is putting pregnant mothers and their newborns at growing risk, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell will warn on Monday.
He will speak at the “pre-COP” summit in Nadi, Fiji, citing a new survey in which more than two-thirds of health professionals across five continents said they had seen complications caused by intense heat in 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.”
“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,” Stiell will say.
“This faultline must not become another deep chasm of climate-driven suffering, inequality and injustice.”
Survey findings
The survey covered 1,000 midwives and doctors in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Brazil and Zimbabwe. It was commissioned by the charitable foundation Wellcome.
It found that nearly all respondents had cared for mothers or babies affected by extreme heat. About a third said they had seen cases of low birth weight or restricted growth, feeding difficulties, and dehydration or heat-related illness, all of which they attributed to extreme heat.
Wellcome’s chairwoman, Australian former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, said mothers and babies are being put at increasing risk by 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.
Record-breaking heat
Scientists warn that climate change is making extreme weather more intense and causing heat records to fall more often.
About 33 countries, spanning 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.
Pre-COP31 summit
Stiell will tell 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,” he will say.
Pacific leaders see the pre-COP31 summit, hosted in Fiji and the remote coral atoll Tuvalu, as a chance to draw attention to life on the frontline of climate change. It precedes the larger UN-sponsored global climate summit, COP31, to be held next month in Turkey.
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