Presentation

Climate change will affect health outcomes through a variety of direct and indirect mechanisms. For at-risk groups such as pregnant women and their newborns, climate change can have adverse effects such as affecting quality of care/functioning of health facilities, decreasing accessibility to clean water sources, increasing heat exposure and/or exposure to pollution, increasing natural disasters that will impact maternity networks and therefore physical accessibility to healthcare, affecting seasonality with effect on access to care, and increased risks from emerging infections.

UNFPA and other international partners, as well as academic entities are starting to include climate change in programmatic planning and research projects, and it is the right time to take stock of the value of climate information, identify evidence gaps, and set a collaborative research agenda to address priorities for decision making. There is a need to understand how to operationalize the evidence to support climate risk management for MNH health services. We therefore propose to run a GHF workshop to discuss these challenges.

The objective of the session is to better understanding of how to model and map the impacts that climate change can have on maternal and newborn health services, especially in LMIC, and a collaborative agenda with a research component on this topic.