It's apparent from recent news that climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves, even if the United States is still dragging its heels on addressing the issue. But even that may change -- a recent poll commissioned by the Presidential Climate Action Project found that 66 percent of American adults want the next president to take strong action on climate change. Many think of this in terms of reducing consumption and greening our energy. But what about the other side of climate change? People -- particularly women and poor people -- will bear the brunt of a changing climate.

Climate change is causing more severe and more frequent storms and drought, resulting in changes in timing and amount of rainfall that damage agricultural production. Added to other environmental degradation, such as deforestation, erosion, and desertification, these changes have significant impacts on the health and livelihoods of people around the world. This particularly affects poor countries, where, ironically, people emit the least per capita, but pay the highest price for the emissions of wealthy, high-emitting countries.

For example, the average Ethiopian emits 200 times less carbon each year than the average American. Yet Ethiopia is expected to experience more severe impacts, including major changes in temperature, water availability, and malaria zones in upcoming years, with few resources to adapt.

The severity of climate change impacts on the poor keep compounding: the poor are often more dependent on the environment for their livelihoods, in the form of small scale agriculture and herding, which can be severely influenced by drought or flooding. Moreover, poor families often have less to fall back on in the event of a climate-related event -- both in terms of financial savings to rebuild their lives, and human capital, including education that would allow them to pursue livelihoods less dependent on the environment.

Just as climate change unequally impacts wealthy and low income countries, as well as the rich and poor within countries, it is also unequal in terms of gender. Emerging evidence shows that women and girls will experience even greater inequality through the impacts of climate change. We already know that women suffer disproportionately in nearly all disasters: elderly women died at higher rates than older men in the European heat wave in 2003, women vastly outnumbered men in tsunami deaths in 2004, women outnumbered men in cyclone deaths in Bangladesh, and the list goes on. A study of 4,605 natural disasters found that disasters shortened women's life expectancy significantly more than men's (encouragingly, this association was reduced where women's status is more equal). Many women are made vulnerable by their lack of access to sources of emergency information, as well as their lack of decision-making power in disaster prevention and preparedness programs; they are also often excluded from disaster recovery operations and from planning at the national level.

The unequal impact on women is not only evident in major disaster events- - it also affects everyday life and opportunities. In many low-income countries, women already work more hours each day than men (a study in rural Cameroon found that women work more than 64 hours a week, compared to men's 31 hours). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that women produce 60-80 percent of food grown in the developing world -- often small scale crops critical to their family's sustenance. Women and girls are responsible for collecting and carrying water -- a time consuming and physically demanding task in places where wells are not easily accessible. In some places, this work takes hours each day, and as communities cope with the effects of changes in climate, demands on women's time and workloads are likely to increase.

To compensate for increased demands on their time, poor families may pull girls out of school, if they were are able to attend at all. The stresses of a changing climate are being added to the many risks already facing women in developing countries, undermining the critical role that women play in the health and well-being of their families, the social cohesion of their communities, and the preservation of their fields, forests, and waterways.

As climate change has unfolded around the world, many governments and development organizations have begun to develop strategies to adapt to the effects of climate change which include a wide variety of approaches, from "climate-proofing" infrastructure to developing drought resistant crops. Some adaptation programs also address underlying factors for vulnerability to climate change, such as poverty and ill health. The UN estimates that $86 billion in new funding will be needed by 2016 to help the world's poor cope with the stresses of climate change. However, contributions to climate adaptation funding mechanisms have so far been relatively small and the funding mechanisms slow.

Important questions that arise are: when that money is in place, what kinds of projects will qualify as adaptation, how will the funds be spent, and how will women's needs be addressed? Already, there is an overall lack of attention to the needs of women in low-income countries, and an even greater lack of women's participation in climate talks on adaptation to climate change and mitigation of climate change through reductions in emissions.

To assess adaptation strategies, we must look at what makes people vulnerable to climate change impacts, or their ability to cope with change without experiencing declines in living standards. Important factors are income level and income inequality, as well as health and human capacity - including education - of a population, in addition to the quality of the natural environment, such as available water and quality of land.

Interestingly, many of these benefits also accrue when women are able to attain good reproductive health. Women's reproductive health, including their ability to space and time births, as well as maternal morbidity and mortality, have important impacts on the health of women and their children. In many cases they also affect children's education and family well-being, particularly among poor families.

The huge scope of climate change requires multiple strategies to prevent its worst effects and stave off reversals in hard won advancements in human health and development around the world. It is troubling that this comes at a time when international financial support for voluntary family planning and reproductive health are declining. The world needs more women-centered research and strategies for climate change adaptation, and the world's large emitters must shoulder the responsibility for their impacts on the world's poorest populations in order to see a world that is more equitable, healthy, able to prevent catastrophic climate change, and to adapt to its impacts.