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If systems cannot protect those most exposed to climate stress,informal women workers, pregnant women in high-heat settings, midwives maintaining care during disasters, grandmothers holding communities together through compounding shocks, they are not effective.
Designing for those most impacted does not weaken systems. It stress-tests them. It reveals the assumptions built into infrastructure, policy, and finance that were never designed for the realities most people actually live. And it produces systems that are, by definition, more resilient for everyone.
"Local capacity and knowledge sharing is needed. We need tailored messages for individual contexts and louder conversations about the impacts so communities can come up with solutions that are fit for purpose. We need language that is accessible for all AND less jargon."
— Session participant, Women Deliver, April 2026
SYSTEMS THAT PROTECT THE MOST EXPOSED
WHAT THE CONVENINGS SURFACED
At Skoll World Forum in Oxford, the gap analysis by issue area produced specific targets: in Access to Care, the Pacific region and South America are largely absent from the conversation; menstrual health supplies for healthcare workers during crises are entirely unaddressed; access to markets during conflict and migration is a critical gap. In Extreme Heat, migration driven by displacement creates conflict risk, and the coexistence infrastructure, including insurance mechanisms, needed to manage it does not exist at scale.
At Women Deliver in Naarm (Melbourne), participants identified First Nations knowledge and 'care for country' as a foundational principle and called explicitly for international institutions to be redesigned to include the voices of communities, especially women and Indigenous peoples. The ICJ Advisory Opinion was named as an underutilized tool in every country, with calls for domestic litigation and advocacy to give it practical reach.
At the Project Dandelion Convening in Nairobi, communities already living on the frontlines of extreme heat are lacking the infrastructure that should exist: no cooling centers, no safe shelters for women and livestock, no health sensors to monitor heat exposure, no heat-resistant crop or livestock varieties in circulation.
And perhaps most striking — in Kenya, traditional building materials that provide natural cooling are no longer being used, their properties overlooked as construction practices have shifted. This is knowledge that took generations to develop and is now disappearing as fast as the glaciers of Mt. Kenya, which will be gone entirely by 2030.
SYSTEMS THAT PROTECT THE MOST EXPOSED
If systems cannot protect those most exposed to climate stress,informal women workers, pregnant women in high-heat settings, midwives maintaining care during disasters, grandmothers holding communities together through compounding shocks, they are not effective.
Designing for those most impacted does not weaken systems. It stress-tests them. It reveals the assumptions built into infrastructure, policy, and finance that were never designed for the realities most people actually live. And it produces systems that are, by definition, more resilient for everyone.
"Local capacity and knowledge sharing is needed. We need tailored messages for individual contexts and louder conversations about the impacts so communities can come up with solutions that are fit for purpose. We need language that is accessible for all AND less jargon."
— Session participant, Women Deliver, April 2026
WHAT THE CONVENINGS SURFACED
At Skoll World Forum in Oxford, the gap analysis by issue area produced specific targets: in Access to Care, the Pacific region and South America are largely absent from the conversation; menstrual health supplies for healthcare workers during crises are entirely unaddressed; access to markets during conflict and migration is a critical gap. In Extreme Heat, migration driven by displacement creates conflict risk, and the coexistence infrastructure, including insurance mechanisms, needed to manage it does not exist at scale.
At Women Deliver in Naarm (Melbourne), participants identified First Nations knowledge and 'care for country' as a foundational principle and called explicitly for international institutions to be redesigned to include the voices of communities, especially women and Indigenous peoples. The ICJ Advisory Opinion was named as an underutilized tool in every country, with calls for domestic litigation and advocacy to give it practical reach.
At the Project Dandelion Convening in Nairobi, communities already living on the frontlines of extreme heat are lacking the infrastructure that should exist: no cooling centers, no safe shelters for women and livestock, no health sensors to monitor heat exposure, no heat-resistant crop or livestock varieties in circulation. And perhaps most striking — in Kenya, traditional building materials that provide natural cooling are no longer being used, their properties overlooked as construction practices have shifted. This is knowledge that took generations to develop and is now disappearing as fast as the glaciers of Mt. Kenya, which will be gone entirely by 2030.
