When the rains came to Pakistan in 2022, they did not fall equally. The torrential floods killed thousands, displaced millions, and wrecked vast stretches of the country. But for women and girls already living on the edge, the disaster tore away what little ground they had.
A United Nations report released this week puts a grim number on an old pattern. Women, girls, and children are 14 times more likely than men to die during extreme weather disasters. Four out of every five people forced from their homes by climate change are women and girls. The crisis is not gender neutral. It never was.
Rural women take the hardest hit. Many depend directly on what they can grow or gather. When drought shrivels a harvest or floods wash away a field, there is no backup. No savings account. No insurance payout. The family goes hungry. The girls get pulled from school to help at home. The women walk farther for water. These are not abstract risks. They are daily realities being made worse, storm by storm.
Disasters do not just destroy homes. They rip apart the systems women rely on. Health clinics flood. Roads wash out. Ambulances cannot reach. Sexual and reproductive health services, often fragile even in good times, vanish overnight. Pregnant women lose access to care. New mothers deliver in the open. Girls lose access to contraception and safe spaces. The report makes clear that acute disasters disrupt these essential services in ways that compound harm for years.
The numbers from Pakistan are a case study. The 2022 floods affected millions. Women there faced displacement, violence, and loss of livelihood in numbers that swamped local response systems. The report notes that extreme weather is pushing women and girls into “increasingly precarious situations almost overnight.” That is not hyperbole. It is what happens when a monsoon dumps a year’s rain in a week.
Even before the storm, women in rural communities struggled to access education and employment. Climate change tightens those constraints. When a family loses its crop, a daughter’s school fees become a luxury. When a mother must walk hours for clean water, she cannot work for wages. The cycle tightens. The gap widens.
The report frames this as a structural problem. Women have less access to information about coming storms. They have less mobility to flee. They have fewer resources to rebuild. These are not random misfortunes. They are inequalities baked into societies, and climate change is turning up the heat.
What is at stake is not just comfort or convenience. It is survival. It is the ability of half the population to access health care, education, and work. It is the chance for girls to stay in school rather than marry early because a disaster wiped out the family income. It is the difference between a temporary setback and a permanent loss.
Governments and international organizations are now being watched. The report offers no simple solutions. But it makes one thing plain: any climate policy that ignores gender is a policy that will fail half the people it is meant to protect. The rains will keep coming. The question is whether the response will finally match the scale of the risk.
