A Literature Review: Climate Change, Health, and Women in Australia

This report provides a literature review assessing the impact of climate change on the health and well-being of women, particularly within the context of Australia. It explores how climate change, through increased heat exposure, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and altered vector-borne...Read More

Running Head: HEALTHCARE
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Healthcare
4/10/2019

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Climate change health and women
Introduction
The assignment is the brief discussion on the assessment of the climate change and the
resulting impact on the health and wellbeing of women. The health outcomes of women as
affected or influenced by the changes in climatic conditions will be studied especially in
context to Australia. The discussion is the literature review of the topic, which will bring
positive or negative effects on the health outcomes.
The concept of climate change refers to the alteration of the world’s weather systems due to
warmer temperatures brought about any human activity. Sorensen et al (2018) stated about
the impacts of climate change on people, or women as increased exposure to heat, poor air
quality, extreme weather events or calamities, and altered vector borne disease affects health.
these aspects of change in climate reduces the high quality of the water quality and the food
security that ultimately affects women’s health. For an instance, the authors mentioned that
women giving birth to a child during the period of disasters may lead to some major issues.
These may consist of the increase in complications including preeclampsia, bleeding and low
birthweight infant. These are the outcomes of their poor psychological and phsycial health
due to the negative changes in the climate or weather. The problem of food insecurity is
further linked to the aspect of nutritional deficiencies, which creates negative influence on the
health of women especially, in the later years of life (Filardo et al., 2016).
In context to the issue or topic, it has analysed that Victoria’s major population lives within
1502 kilometres of the coast. Under this, rising levels of sea and storm surges may affect or
cause increased risk of flooding and erosion, which leads to loss of biodiversity, and
ecosystem.

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According to the researchers, McKinnon (2016) it has been analysed that in Australia people
or women suffer from numerous health issues from climate changes. Health consequences
may consist of disease, overcrowding, and mental health problems. Women face issues in
terms of respiratory, cardiac, and allergic illnesses due to worsening air pollution. Number of
gastrointestinal illness has found increased amongst women due to food-borne diseases
(Alston, Clarke and Whittenbury, 2018).
Apart from this, it has been found that women in rural regions suffer more than the ones
living in urban areas or developed regions/cities of the country. Many of the health risks are
likely to be affected by the changes in climatic conditions, depicts the differences in gender.
Globally, the impact of natural disasters within country, like droughts, flood, and storms kill
more women than men (World Health Organisation, 2018).
Thus, a relationship between the climate change and rural Australia has observed to a major
extent leading to health impacts for women. a number of social implications has been
observed for the rural women adapting to the climate change in relation to issues of shortage
of water. In general, rural Australians experience poor health outcomes, and have high
mortality rates. Therefore, they suffer from chronic health conditions, which state the need of
initiating measures to improve their poor health.

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References
Alston, M., Clarke, J. and Whittenbury, K. (2018) Contemporary Feminist Analysis of
Australian Farm Women in the Context of Climate Changes. Social Sciences, 7(2), p.16.
Filardo, G., da Graca, B., Sass, D.M., Pollock, B.D., Smith, E.B. and Martinez, M.A.M.
(2016) Trends and comparison of female first authorship in high impact medical journals:
observational study (1994-2014). bmj, 352, p.847.
McKinnon, J. and Alston, M. (2016) Ecological social work: Towards sustainability. United
States: Macmillan International Higher Education.
Sorensen, C., Saunik, S., Sehgal, M., Tewary, A., Govindan, M., Lemery, J. and Balbus, J.,
2018. Climate Change and Women's Health: Impacts and Opportunities in
India. GeoHealth, 2(10), pp. 283-297.
World Health Organisation. (2018) Gender, Climate change and health. [online] Available
from: https://www.who.int/globalchange/GenderClimateChangeHealthfinal.pdf [Accessed
10/03/19].