Zubair Qureshi
The speakers at a seminar on the psychological impacts of climate change on women underscored that women received four times more impacts of a heat wave than men and the increased climate anxiety among women was a serious issue affecting their health and needed attention of the policymakers.
They were addressing a seminar titled “Climate Anxiety and its Impact on Women: Addressing the Silent Crisis” organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).
The event provided an open platform for women hailing from different fields and backgrounds to share their insights on the study done on climate anxiety prevalence in Pakistan.
Dr ShafqatMunir, Deputy Executive Director, SDPI said that climate anxiety in the context of women showed that she faced anxiety twice once during her suffering and the other if her family member was impacted by any disaster.
In urban areas, women are facing climate anxiety but in rural areas and others where women have no voice, no idea of climate anxiety that needs to be probed and further studied to bring tangible outcomes for enhancing women’s resilience, he added.
Dr Shafqat mentioned that the study would serve as a baseline data for further rollout of the research in the rural areas.
ZainabNaeem, Associate Research Fellow SDPI while presenting the key study findings said that the country in 2020 realized that the region was facing the highest temperatures as compared to the preceding years. However, recent projections indicate that the rising temperature might cross human bearable thresholds in the long run.
“Climate Change has increased heatwave and floods’ intensity with extreme prevalence of anxiety disorders that directly linked mental disorders to climate change. In 2019, mental disorders affected 301 million people around the globe,” she said.
Women, youngsters, and children from impoverished communities were more prone to bear the impacts of climate disasters, whereas people with mental illness were three times more prone to risk of death than people without mental illness, she added.
“One percent increase in suicides with an approximate one-degree increase in temperature above local ambient threshold revealed that hotter cities were more violent than cooler cities,” Zainab said.
Zainab Naeem said that the objective of the study was to assess the linkage of climate change with mental health of the masses and for that an online survey was done that received 500 responses. However, the respondents hailed from different occupations comprising 65% females and Meta’s role in advancing child protection, privacy initiatives commendable: Minister
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