The risk of loosing your baby when pregnant is increased by the effects of climate change and pollution.(Photo illustration by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
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Extreme heat and air pollution are heightening the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, and premature birth. However, pregnant women are often overlooked in global climate and health strategies.
Dr. Vaaruni Ravishankar, eight months into her pregnancy, found herself experiencing the climate crisis from dual perspectives. In Chennai, India, as a dermatologist, she treats patients suffering from the effects of intense heat. Personally, as an expectant mother, she felt the crisis deeply. In a video for Our Kids’ Climate, she encapsulated her experience with one word: exhausted.
Dr. Vaaruni Ravishankar was exhausted during her pregnancy due to the extreme heat from climate change. Photo cred: Nina Subrami, Our Kids´Climate
NIna Subrami
This exhaustion is more than a mere feeling. Pregnancy demands a lot from the body, and extreme heat makes it worse—leading to dehydration, heat stress, skin infections, and breathlessness when the body is least able to handle extra stress. Evidence shows these conditions are not only uncomfortable but dangerous, and the data supporting this is substantial and growing.
The evidence is hardening
A significant study from Dr. Ravishankar’s city highlights the issue. Researchers at Chennai’s Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research tracked 800 pregnant women, focusing on those doing physically demanding jobs in agriculture, brick kilns, and salt pans amid intense heat. Women with high heat exposure at work were approximately twice as likely to experience miscarriage or stillbirth compared to those in cooler environments, and faced higher risks of adverse birth outcomes overall.
This is a biological issue, not coincidental. Heat affects a developing fetus similarly to a toxin, disrupting organ development early in pregnancy and growth later on. A systematic review in Seminars in Perinatology warns that as the planet heats up, nearly 4 billion people could soon live outside safe environmental conditions, facing dangerously high wet-bulb temperatures around 35°C, where the body can no longer cool itself. Pregnant women are highly vulnerable in this scenario.
Importantly, this issue is not limited to tropical areas. Research funded by Wellcome, which has allocated ÂŁ17 million to nine projects on heat and maternal health worldwide, reveals the same pattern from India to the UK.
A warning for wealthy nations, too
The UK provides a glimpse of what unprepared health systems might face. During the 2022 heatwave, UK temperatures exceeded 40°C for the first time, leading to an estimated 3,000 heat-related deaths—a testament to both the threat’s scope and the country’s lack of readiness, according to Wellcome’s report Pregnancy in a warming world.
Despite growing evidence, pregnant women are still not consistently recognized as a clinically vulnerable group in public health guidance and government policies. The Wellcome report suggests this oversight puts people at unnecessary risk and recommends two changes in the UK: a cohesive national approach to heat-health risks for pregnant women and integrating climate resilience into long-term maternity care reform. This includes explicitly naming pregnant women in heatwave guidance, adjusting the heat thresholds for official alerts, and evaluating whether maternity facilities can handle rising temperatures.
Heat is only part of the picture
Air pollution is another major climate-related threat to pregnancy. Fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) from fossil-fuel combustion and wildfires can penetrate deeply into the body. The same Seminars in Perinatology review links air pollution to an increased risk of preterm birth in most studies and low birth weight in an even larger proportion. Heat and polluted air are not separate risks; they come from the same source and compound each other.
The youngest are most exposed
The children born today start life amid these hazards. UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026, based on a new Global Child Hazard Database, indicates that nearly every child on Earth faces at least one major climate hazard, with about 1.1 billion experiencing three or more overlapping threats, such as drought, extreme heat, and heatwaves. Young bodies are less capable of handling these stresses, underscoring the need for protection starting before birth.
The policy blind spot
The uncomfortable truth is that planning to safeguard people often overlooks pregnancy. The 10 New Insights in Climate Science report, aimed at global climate negotiators, points out that while health is a key focus in national adaptation plans, there’s scant attention to maternal, reproductive, and children’s health—a gap identified by the NAP Global Network and the UN Population Fund.
Addressing this gap doesn’t require complex technology. It involves incorporating pregnancy into heat action plans, training maternal health workers and community leaders to recognize early signs of dehydration and heat stress, and ensuring pregnant workers are protected during extreme weather without risking their jobs or incomes. These measures can translate evidence into fewer lost pregnancies.
What action looks like
The global coalition Our Kids´Climate is advocating at all major climate events to protect the lives of children, including the babies not yet born.
Our KIds´Climate
The ongoing reforms in maternity care in the UK and elsewhere offer a unique opportunity to build health systems suited to the climate we face, rather than the one for which they were originally designed. Delaying action introduces new vulnerabilities into already strained systems.
Immediate protection is needed for pregnant women and babies from the heat and pollution prevalent today. Every degree of warming prevented now makes mothers and children safer in the future, which requires a rapid end to fossil fuel reliance.
Our Kids’ Climate (OKC) supports parents, grandparents, and caregivers in over 50 countries to combat the climate crisis’s impact on children. At climate conferences, including the COP in Brazil, OKC ensures that the health and rights of children, born and unborn, are prioritized in negotiations.
Maya Mailer, co-director of Our Kids’ Climate, states: “Our children’s health is threatened. Fossil fuel burning pollutes the air our kids breathe and jeopardizes their present and future by overheating our planet. This summer’s record heatwaves across Europe, wildfires from Spain and France to Canada, and extreme heat in Africa and Asia emit hazardous pollutants. Children and pregnant women bear the health costs of climate breakdown, but parents are increasingly determined to act. They are advocating for a healthier, safer world, from restoring nature to establishing pollution-free zones around schools, and pushing for climate and health policies and clean, renewable energy.”
OKC will participate in COP31 to continue highlighting the climate crisis’s impact on children’s health and the urgent need for collective action to adapt to extreme heat, clean the air, and halt the burning of heat-trapping fossil fuels.
In an Instagram interview, Our Kids´Climate concluded with Dr. Vaaruni Ravishankar that no mother or baby should bear the burden of a warming world in their own body. Unfortunately, this is increasingly becoming the case.
Sources: Sri Ramachandra Institute / BJOG cohort study; Wellcome, Pregnancy in a warming world and Wellcome heat-and-pregnancy research programme; Pandipati et al., Seminars in Perinatology (2023); UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026; 10 New Insights in Climate Science.
