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The Insidious Ways Women Bear the Brunt of Climate Change
Our fight to protect the planet is incomplete without a gender-based perspective
There’s a fetid haze in the air when I call emergency medicine physician Dr. Cecilia Sorensen, who is fresh off an ER shift at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. I’m in California, some 150 miles from Paradise, where the Camp Fire has practically leveled an entire town. It’s not yet the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history, but air pollution levels are climbing across the state.
As a doctor, Sorensen knows that when wildfire particulate matter spikes, so do ICU admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms like asthma attacks. As a climate change researcher, she’s focused on the link between a warming world and these health impacts. A more arid climate and worsening drought have encouraged the spread of wildfires, she says, which in turn are “causing issues in health care systems… but we don’t really talk about the fact that these issues are partially due to climate change.”
Through her research, Sorensen seeks to add gender to the conversation, too, spotlighting the insidious and often ignored ways that climate change impacts women’s health more severely than it does men’s.
