MSI at COP: The UN Climate Change Conference
This November, MSI is attending the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Every year, representatives from more than 190 countries gather at this conference to negotiate agreements and lay out plans to advance solutions to the climate crisis. This year, MSI is contributing to COP29, bringing SRHR to the forefront of the conversation.
Key messages on how MSI’s work intersects with the climate crisis:
- A Gendered Crisis: For many of the women MSI serves, the climate crisis is their everyday reality. Women and girls are hardest hit by the climate crisis. Facing gendered discrimination, lower incomes and poorer access to food and other resources, the UN has warned that women and girls will suffer for longer and more severely from climate shocks and disasters. 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. It’s essential for women to be able to prevent unintended pregnancy while they navigate challenges like natural disasters, displacement, and lack of food sources.
- Building Resilience: By providing women and girls with the tools they need to adapt—including access to contraception—we can support girls to stay in school and women to become economically independent and healthier. Increased agency, equality and resilience means that women are better able to support their families and participate in decision-making around climate adaptation and solution-building.
- Listening to What Women Want: To adapt and build their own resilience to these challenges, women and girls on the frontlines of the crisis have made it clear that they want reproductive choice. They tell us that contraception gives them control when their surroundings are in turmoil. They want the ability to plan their pregnancies, and the agency to make their own healthcare decisions.
- MSI Research Shows 14 million at Risk: Research from MSI projects that 14 million women and girls are at risk of losing access to contraception over the next decade due to climate change-related displacement. This would result in around 17 million additional unintended pregnancies, 6 million unsafe abortions, and 20,000 maternal deaths. And yet, women and girls—and their health—are not adequately supported in the climate response. They are being left behind.
- MSI Teams are on the Frontline: MSI teams are in climate-affected communities protecting women’s access to reproductive health services—in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malawi, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Myanmar, and beyond. By delivering reproductive healthcare in challenging climate-impacted settings, we support women and girls’ health and choices when they need them most.
- Calling for SRHR in Climate Funding: Development funding isn’t always flexible enough to allow organizations like MSI to respond to climate emergencies, so we are calling for health funding to be more flexible to extend to crisis situations. As for climate financing, a minuscule amount is allocated to health and even less is available for sexual and reproductive health. We are calling on governments to ring-fence a greater portion of climate funding for SRHR as a critical component of climate adaptation and resilience. We can work together on globally connected and locally implemented partnerships to address gender, health and climate change with integrated solutions.
