Extreme Heat: Women-Led Solutions for Resilient Communities

Join GAGGA for new research on why extreme heat is a climate, health, gender, and finance challenge - and who is leading solutions.
About this Event

Extreme heat is rapidly becoming one of the deadliest and most overlooked impacts of climate change. Yet it is not only an environmental challenge: it is a public health crisis, a gender equality issue, and a climate justice issue.

Women, girls, trans, intersex and non-binary people often experience disproportionate impacts from extreme heat, not because of individual characteristics, but because of structural inequalities that shape exposure, access to resources, decision-making power and adaptive capacity. Heat affects maternal and reproductive health, mental health, livelihoods, food and water security, unpaid care work, labour conditions and gender-based violence.

Despite growing global attention to heat, adaptation responses remain largely technocratic or focused on individual behavioural change. Far less attention is given to the community organisations already developing collective, locally led solutions that address the structural drivers of vulnerability.

This year, the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA), with support from ClimateWorks Foundation, has been conducting one of the first cross-regional Feminist Participatory Action Research initiatives on extreme heat. Led by women-led community-based organisations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, the research documents how communities are experiencing heat, the adaptation strategies they are already implementing, and what is needed to scale these solutions through more equitable climate finance.

The session will bring together those working at the intersection of climate, health and gender to hear emerging evidence from GAGGA's global research. This will include examining how extreme heat affects communities through interconnected challenges - including health, livelihoods, food systems, water access, care work and environmental degradation - and how women-led organisations are responding through collective, locally grounded solutions.