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Paper short abstract

Analysing climate-related health inequalities in Indonesia’s garment sector, this paper argues that existing labour arrangements enable the strain of extreme weather to be placed on workers’ bodies. Hence, equitable climate futures require attending to power asymmetries embedded in labour relations.

Paper long abstract

The global garment industry is a major contributor to carbon emissions. Ironically, extreme weather now affects production in this sector adversely. In Indonesia’s export processing zones, rising temperatures and increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns have direct material consequences for garment workers: Flooded streets and factories threaten workers’ health through accidents and exposure to pathogens; heat inside factories exacerbates bodily stress and renders production targets harder to fulfil. Climate-induced extreme weather thus intensifies the already harmful conditions of sweatshop work. This could be solved through changes to drainage and cooling infrastructure; but instead, workers are forced to endure dangerous conditions. Further, the low wages paid for garment work do not allow workers to access sufficient health care or flood-safe housing. Demanding improvements or staying home during heavy rain usually mean risking one’s job, but some unions are taking up climate-related concerns into their work.

Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with garment workers and labour organisers in Indonesia’s export-oriented garment industry, I argue, firstly, that the effects of climate-related extreme weather for workers’ health are inextricably bound up with the highly precarious labour relations workers are embedded in. Secondly, I contend that recognition of labour relations as central to the experience of climate change, and in turn changes in weather as relevant to the experience of labour, have to be key to the design of just climate futures. If power and material inequalities embedded in exploitative labour regimes are not addressed, exposure to climate change will continue to exacerbate societal inequalities.

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This study examines the overlooked health and psychological impacts of climate change in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Beyond material losses, communities experience anxiety, trauma, disrupted mourning, and cultural loss highlighting the need to address non-economic dimensions of climate change.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the health impacts of climate change with a particular focus on psychological and intangible losses that are often overlooked in climate impact assessments. Using qualitative approach that combined literature review with country specific case studies in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the study documented lived experiences from climate related loss and damage through in-depth interviews and key informant interviews. Findings reveal that, in addition to tangible losses such as housing, livelihoods, infrastructure, and food, affected communities experience significant non-economic losses, including the destruction of cultural significance sites, disruption of social services, and profound psychological distress. Fear of recurrent disasters has contributed to widespread anxiety depression and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, particularly among individuals who have lost family members and property. One of the most profound challenges is the inability to properly mourn lost family members. For those whose relatives’ bodies were never recovered, the absence of graves has prevented them from conducting traditional death and burial rituals, which are crucial for achieving closure. Additionally, some survivors have suffered permanent disabilities, further compounding their losses by limiting their ability to work and sustain themselves. The study also highlights cultural barriers to discussing death and grief with children, further compounding emotional distress. Ultimately, these experiences underscore the psychosocial toll of climate-related disasters, particularly the trauma caused by different types of loss, including death.

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Climate change in Ghana’s Volta Delta worsens children’s mental health via flooding and displacement. While adaptation focuses on infrastructure, psychosocial wellbeing is neglected. Community coping exists, but exclusion highlights inequities in climate–health planning.

Paper long abstract

Climate change is reshaping global health futures in ways that reflect and reproduce existing inequalities, particularly in the Global South. This paper examines children’s mental health in Ghana’s Volta Delta, a coastal region experiencing recurrent flooding, erosion, and displacement, to show how dominant climate and development responses marginalize psychosocial wellbeing. It argues that while climate adaptation efforts prioritize physical infrastructure and emergency relief, children’s mental health remains largely invisible within climate–health planning.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines the Child PTSD Symptom Scale for DSM-V (CPSS-V SR), the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale–Youth version (DASS-Y), and semi-structured interviews with children affected by repeated climate-related displacement. Findings reveal high levels of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder linked to disrupted schooling, loss of social networks, and prolonged uncertainty about the future. These outcomes illustrate how climate change functions as a threat multiplier, intensifying mental health risks within already fragile health and social protection systems.

The paper also highlights community-based coping strategies, including kinship support, collective caregiving, and culturally embedded practices that sustain children’s wellbeing in contexts of limited institutional support. While these responses demonstrate local agency, they also expose the unequal distribution of responsibility for climate-health adaptation. The paper argues that the continued neglect of children’s mental health in climate responses constitutes a form of exclusion, raising ethical questions about whose health is prioritized in development under climate stress. Centering children's lived experiences is therefore essential to building more just and inclusive climate–health futures.

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This paper explores how informal workers in Delhi understand the health risks of extreme heat and air pollution as embedded in contexts of work, urban mobility, and social networks. It argues for emerging climate-health frameworks to engage with such subjective experiences of climatic vulnerability.

Paper long abstract

Urban health impacts of climate change are embedded in everyday environments of work, mobility, and urban precarity. In Delhi, informal workers understand their experiences of extreme heat and air pollution as embedded in overlapping material, social, and subjective relations of work. Drawing on qualitative research with such workers, this paper explores how climate-related vulnerabilities are produced, experienced, and negotiated through relations of class and work within the city.

The analysis unfolds by first situating workers within the urban landscape. Various contexts of informality and mobility are foregrounded to understand the uneven distribution of environmental risks and health impacts. The paper then examines how workers’ networks and social relations mediate their capacity to cope with environmental stressors, revealing how political-economic inequalities are reproduced through informal systems of support, exclusion, and varying capacities to endure. Lastly, the paper attends to work as an embodied and self-making experience, showing how workers understand, normalise, and morally frame environmental exposure, and any resultant health impacts, as integral to their labour and class position.

The paper traces how workers respond to environmental stress through adjustment, endurance, and collective reasoning. Accordingly, it argues for an expansion of climate-health frameworks to accommodate such subjective experiences of the environment, navigated through idioms of work, responsibility, and necessity. In trying to understand local agency within its structural constraints, this paper contributes to debates on climate justice, health equity, and development studies, and demonstrates how health impacts of climate change are lived, contested, and navigated from below in the Global South.

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This study examines how exposure to natural disasters affect health differently by gender among adults aged 45+ in four major Indian metropolitan cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. The analysis also accounts for the ‘vulnerabilities’ faced by these cities in the context of climate change.

Paper long abstract

There is growing evidence that climate change will intensify the frequency and severity of natural disasters. Beyond the immediate toll on health and mortality, disasters often trigger indirect, long-term effects through mechanisms such as household income shocks, food insecurity, and restricted access to health care. Additionally, cities are sites where climate impacts intersect with social inequalities, magnifying risks for marginalized groups, especially women, children and elderly. This study examines how natural disasters affect health differently by gender among adults 45+ in 4 metro cities in India – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, considering each city’s climate vulnerabilities.

The study utilizes data from the first wave of the Longitudinal Ageing Survey of India (LASI – Wave 1), World Health Organization’s data on natural disasters, Census 2011 data, and economic reports of states. The dependent variable ‘endemic disease’ is a binary variable, defined as the presence of any of the three types of diseases i.e., water-borne, vector-borne and infectious diseases in the past two years. The key independent variables are the ‘exposure to a natural disaster’ and the ‘climate change vulnerability index’. The vulnerability index captures the capability of a city to face a natural hazard. The control variables include socio economic and behavioral characteristics of the older adults. Multivariate logistic regression method was used to estimate the risk of endemic disease, given the exposure and vulnerability. The findings show that exposure to a natural disaster increases the risk of endemic diseases with significant variations by gender, age, socioeconomic characteristics and vulnerability.

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Climate change worsens health disparities in Lesotho, impacting vulnerable groups. Extreme weather events challenge health access, while current interventions fail to address specific needs. The study advocates for political reforms and tailored health policies to enhance equity and meet SDG 3.

Paper long abstract

Climate change serves as a threat multiplier in the global South, where the impacts of extreme weather are inextricably linked to asymmetric power structures and systemic marginalisation. Due to increasing frequency of droughts, floods, snowfall and extreme temperatures, vulnerable populations in Lesotho are disproportionately burdened by these factors, whose resilience is often undermined by top-down governance models. While state and non-state actors have initiated climate-smart interventions, these frameworks frequently operate within rigid institutional bureaucracy that prioritise generalised aid over the intersectional health needs of chronically ill groups, including the elderly, women, youth, and persons with disabilities. This study argues that the "one-size-fits-all" approach to health provision in Lesotho reflects a technocratic bias that neglects the political economy of health access. Drawing on a case study of the Mafeteng District, the research examines how centralised decision-making and asymmetric resource allocation shape the health-seeking behavior of the chronically ill during climate-induced disruptions. It investigates how extreme weather events exacerbate existing socio-political barriers for individuals managing conditions such as HIV, diabetes, and hypertension. Moreover, the study assesses the adequacy of current policy frameworks, questioning whether current power configurations and institutional protocols actively facilitate or obstruct equitable health access. By situating health-seeking behavior within the context of governance and structural authority, the research provides critical insights into the political reforms necessary to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.

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I examine how statelessness shapes negative health outcomes among Assam’s Miya community. Settled by the British in climate-sensitive river islands, they now face targeted exclusion. My work analyses statelessness as a political determinant that drives health vulnerabilities.

Paper long abstract

This study examines the health consequences of statelessness among the Miya community in Assam, India. Originally settled by the British on climate-exposed river islands, the community now faces statelessness. Although scholarship has addressed the legal and political dimensions of statelessness, its public health implications remain underexplored. Drawing on Daniel Dawes’ framework of political determinants of health, this work analyses how statelessness functions as a political determinant of health.

Using a qualitative ethnographic approach rooted in an emic perspective, I conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews with stateless individuals, families affected by exclusion or detention, community health workers, and civil society actors. Fieldwork included time spent in detention centres, with families bereaved by suicide, and within hospitals and everyday community spaces, listening to narratives of fear, illness, and endurance. Interview transcripts and field notes were analysed using grounded theory.

Findings reveal a consistent pattern of adverse health outcomes produced through both political action and political inaction. Political action generated harm through mobility restrictions, forced displacement, torture, and violence. Political inaction contributed to negative outcomes through chronic underinvestment in climate-adaptive health infrastructure, failure to rebuild trust in health systems, and the absence of accountability for discriminatory or racially motivated medical negligence.

The study positions statelessness as a critical political determinant of health, demonstrating how state practices directly and indirectly shape the well-being of stateless populations. These insights offer a foundation for advocates, researchers, and health system actors seeking to advance the health rights and social justice claims of stateless communities.