By The Pulseline News Desk
Extreme heat driven by climate change is increasingly threatening the health of pregnant women and newborns, with complications including premature births, stillbirths and low birth weight becoming a growing concern, United Nations (UN) climate chief Simon Stiell is set to warn.
Speaking at the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji, Stiell is expected to highlight new research showing that more than two-thirds of health professionals surveyed across five continents had witnessed pregnancy or childbirth complications linked to extreme heat over the past five years.
“Rising temperatures mean rising danger in pregnancy,” Stiell is expected to tell delegates, warning that climate-driven heat exposure is increasingly being associated with premature birth, stillbirth, low birth weight and maternal complications.
He is expected to describe pregnancy and childbirth as a new “fault line” in the global climate crisis, warning that the impacts could deepen existing inequalities and climate-related suffering.
The findings come from a survey of 1,000 midwives and doctors in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Brazil and Zimbabwe commissioned by the Wellcome charitable foundation.
Nearly all respondents have said they had cared for mothers or babies experiencing the effects of extreme heat. Around one-third have reported seeing cases of low birth weight or restricted growth, feeding difficulties, dehydration and heat-related illness that they believed were caused by extreme heat.
Wellcome Chairwoman and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said climate change was placing mothers and babies at increasing risk.
“Extreme heat is an invisible killer, but pregnant women must not be invisible,” Gillard has said, calling on world leaders to act on the available evidence and solutions.
The warnings come as scientists continue to report that climate change is making extreme weather more intense and contributing to more frequent heat records.
According to an analysis by AFP of data from the European Union’s Copernicus climate observatory, around 33 countries stretching from western Europe to the Sahel and Central America recorded their hottest July since records began this year.
Stiell is expected to tell delegates that pregnancy should be a period of hope, but that for millions of women it is increasingly becoming a period of anxiety as climate-related risks enter everyday life.
The issue is expected to receive particular attention at the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji and the remote Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, where leaders are seeking to highlight the consequences of climate change for communities living on the frontline of rising temperatures and extreme weather.
The Fiji gathering is a precursor to COP31, the UN-backed global climate summit scheduled to take place in Türkiye next month, where countries will face renewed pressure to strengthen measures to address climate change and protect vulnerable populations.
The growing evidence on extreme heat and pregnancy adds another dimension to the global climate debate, highlighting that the consequences of rising temperatures extend beyond environmental damage and increasingly affect maternal and newborn health.
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