Break Free!
At the Crossroads of Climate Change, SRHR, Gender, and Education: Finding Pathways to Resilience
- Authors
- Pam Baatsen, Hannah Kabelka, Anne Karan
- Publication year
- Augustus 2025
This review highlights the urgent need to address the intersecting impacts of climate change on adolescents and young people in Southern Africa—particularly in relation to SRHR, gender equality, and education. Climate change exacerbates existing structural inequalities, disproportionately affecting marginalised groups such as girls, LGBTQI+ youth, young people with disabilities, and those living in poverty or displacement. These groups face cascading harms: school closures, increased gender-based violence, disrupted SRHR services, and harmful coping strategies such as child marriage or transactional sex. These disruptions are interconnected and cyclical, reinforcing poverty, reducing access to education and health services, and deepening gendered vulnerabilities.