A Resilient System Protects a Pregnant Woman: Inside the Climate-Health-Gender Compact
The Valerian Fund exists to protect and advance women's health and rights across the lifecourse, in the face of climate change so we're proud to support The Project Dandelion Climate-Health-Gender Compact because this is where our mission meets architecture.
The Compact starts from a premise many of us already acknowledge: the solutions already exist. CARE Vanuatu has integrated climate-health planning into its national disaster response. Sewa International is equipping women workers in India with heat insurance and passive cooling. Kenya became the first African country to approve a national policy on care--see earlier post about the proCHW work of Community Health Impact Coalition. The momentum is real, $300M pledged by international philanthropies, 70+ countries signed to the Global Cooling Pledge, WHO's ATACH coordinating commitments on climate-resilient health systems.
What's missing is interoperability. Capital, policy, and delivery systems run in parallel rather than in sequence, so initiatives duplicate instead of reinforce, and proven pilots never reach durable scale.
Two numbers hold the case. 2.4 billion people face heat stress in outdoor or poorly ventilated spaces. Less than 1% of climate finance reaches gender-focused work.
The Compact's sharpest contribution is treating maternal and newborn health as a leading indicator of climate adaptation readiness, not a downstream outcome. A system that cannot protect a pregnant woman is not a resilient system. That reframes access to care as essential infrastructure rather than social service, and midwives and community health workers as climate-resilience infrastructure.
This is why we at TVF invest upstream---on research and policy reform, resilient infrastructure, a prepared and protected workforce and why women must be positioned as architects of resilience, not beneficiaries. Triple returns: stronger health systems, gender equity, climate resilience.
Keep an eye on the Compact and Project Dandelion!
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