Plate Nº 29 · recorded November 13, 2026
Earth & ClimateReported finding
Of 211 Climate-Health Indicators, Only One Reports Data Separately for Women and Men
An audit of four global climate-health monitoring systems finds 45 life-measuring indicators, only one broken down by sex. The data often exists; it is merged before publication.
By Priya Raman4 min read776 words
In brief
- Only 1 of 45 indicators measuring people's lives across four monitoring systems reports results by sex
- In Latin America and the Caribbean, men die from heat-related causes at nearly twice the rate of women
- Only 5 of 166 indicators on plans and systems mention sex or gender in any way
- Belém indicator definitions are due to be agreed by a technical working group in November 2027
- None of the eight health indicators adopted at COP30 in November 2025 request sex breakdowns
Of 45 climate-health indicators that measure people's lives across four major global monitoring systems, exactly one reports results separately for women and men. A wider audit of 211 indicators found that only the Lancet Countdown's count of outdoor workers reveals whether the sexes are affected differently, and that just five of 166 indicators measuring plans, systems and environments mention sex or gender in any form.
The audit, whose authors presented their case as negotiators gathered at the U.N. climate summit COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, covered four frameworks: the Belém Adaptation Indicators agreed at last year's U.N. climate summit in Brazil, the World Health Organization's survey of health ministries, a scorecard grading countries' climate plans on health, and the Lancet Countdown, an annual scientific stocktaking.
Why one merged number misleads
The health risks that climate change amplifies are not distributed evenly between the sexes, and not always in the direction intuition suggests. More women than men die from exposure to cooking-fire smoke overall. Yet for most of adult life, a man is more likely to die from a given exposure than a woman of the same age. Men often reach midlife with hearts and lungs already damaged by smoking and by the dust, fumes and diesel exhaust of work in mines, on construction sites, on farms and near traffic, so a smaller exposure to cooking smoke does greater damage.
Heat tells a similarly split story. In Europe, studies of individual heat waves have found women at higher risk of heat-related death. In Latin America and the Caribbean, men die from heat-related causes at nearly twice the rate women do, according to the Global Burden of Disease study — the largest systematic effort to count what kills people and makes them ill, producing comparable estimates for every country by age and sex every year since 1990. It is coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The mechanisms behind such differences combine sex and gender. Biological makeup shapes how bodies respond physiologically to heat and smoke, and pregnancy brings additional risks. Social roles place women and men in different situations: who works on a construction site in 40°C (104°F) heat, who cooks indoors over wood, who can reach a clinic. A single merged total hides all of that nuance, the authors argue, and knowing why outcomes differ — exposure, susceptibility, or access to cooling, transportation and care — tells decision-makers where to intervene.
Is this a data gap or a publishing choice?
For much of the gap, the data already exists. Surveys and death registers are routinely separated by sex, but the figures are merged into a single total before publication. The Lancet Countdown's own methods appendix shows that three of its indicators use sex-split data and then merge it before release. The Belém indicators that count people will draw on household surveys, death registers and workforce records, which routinely report by sex. These could be published by sex in the next reporting cycle with little or no new data collection, the authors write.
Where data is genuinely missing or scattered, filling the gap costs money — and that is where climate and health funders could make the most difference, the audit's authors argue.
What happens next, and by when?
The merged totals are what reach the people who decide what counts as progress and where money goes: philanthropic funders choosing programs, governments filling out the U.N.'s new adaptation scorecard, and negotiators who will use those scorecards to judge whether the world is adapting at COP33 in 2028.
The Belém indicators — the U.N.'s new yardstick for national adaptation — still lack detailed definitions. A technical working group is meant to agree by November 2027 on what each indicator measures, which data sources it uses, and whether results are broken down by groups such as women and men. The record so far is not encouraging. Of 16 expert proposals for health indicators circulated in May 2025, three asked for results by sex; by September 2025, there was one. The eight indicators adopted at COP30 in November 2025 include none.
The technical group itself was due to be formed in June 2026, but governments could not agree on who should sit on it, so the decision returns to COP31. If the group includes people who know how to produce statistics by sex, and if sex-disaggregated reporting becomes the default wherever source data already has it, the next decade of climate adaptation could show who it reached — and who is left behind. The auditors say they will repeat their audit as each framework updates.
via phys.org/rss-feed/ (Source)
More from Priya Raman
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Senior reporter covering people, launches and day-to-day practice in general science news at SciBeat.
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