Intrinsically Linked - How Climate Change Deepens Menstrual Injustice

In this blog we hear from activist and researcher Riya Singh who spent the summer of 2025 in placement with Irise International exploring the intersection between climate and menstrual justice.

When climate disasters strike, headlines often focus on infrastructure damage, economic loss, or migration. Rarely do we hear about the silent crisis unfolding in the lives of women and menstruators - those whose basic right to manage their periods with dignity becomes uncertain when water sources dry up, floods contaminate toilets, or supply chains for menstrual products collapse. This blog explores the often-overlooked intersection between menstrual health and climate justice, examining how climate change shapes the menstrual experiences of those who menstruate. It also highlights why gender-just climate action must include menstrual justice, offering three key takeaways on how we can strengthen this connection.

Understanding the Frameworks: Where Gender, Climate, and Justice Meet

Climate Justice: From Environmental Impacts to Social Responsibility

While climate science tends to emphasize emissions and rising temperatures, climate justice reframes the crisis as one rooted in fairness and responsibility, highlighting that those least responsible—especially women, low-income groups, and communities in the Global South—bear the greatest burdens (Roberts & Parks, 2006). From a menstrual health lens, this perspective exposes how environmental disruptions create embodied inequalities: droughts and water shortages limit access to clean water for menstrual hygiene, floods destroy toilets and health facilities, and extreme weather events disrupt education and reproductive healthcare. These cascading impacts deepen vulnerabilities, increasing the risks of infection, psychological distress, and gender-based violence, particularly for those living in crisis or displacement settings.

Climate justice thus connects the physical realities of environmental breakdown with the social realities of inequality and exclusion. It asks not only who is most affected but also whose needs are systematically overlooked. 

Menstrual Justice: Dignity, Rights, and Structural Change

Menstrual justice reframes menstruation as a matter of human rights and social justice rather than a private or purely biological issue. It goes beyond access to safe products and facilities to address the wider social, economic, and political systems that shape menstrual experiences. This concept links menstrual health to dignity, participation, and environmental sustainability, recognizing that inequities arise from intersecting forces like poverty, stigma, and policy neglect—challenges that are further worsened by climate change. For example, droughts that limit water access or floods that damage sanitation infrastructure make menstrual management not just a hygiene issue but one of safety and autonomy. It centers structural change over short-term solutions and calls for integrating menstrual health into climate adaptation efforts. 

In the webinar, Riya asked participants to share what they understood as menstrual justice

Intersectionality: Mapping Overlapping Inequalities

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality underscores how overlapping identities—such as gender, class, race, age, and disability—interact to create distinct forms of marginalization or privilege. Instead of viewing these identities in isolation, intersectionality reveals how they compound to produce layered vulnerabilities within systems of inequality. Applied to menstrual health and climate change, this lens emphasizes that not all menstruators experience these challenges in the same way. For instance, low-income menstruators in disaster-prone areas globally face multiple barriers, including limited access to menstrual products, unsafe sanitation facilities, and exclusion from decision-making spaces. By applying an intersectional lens, we can understand how menstrual health is shaped by both social position and environmental exposure, revealing that climate change amplifies existing inequalities rather than creating new ones.

From Menstrual Health to Menstrual Justice in a Warming World

The consequences of the impacts are global, however they are not faced by everyone equally. Menstruators across the globe, especially in rural or climate-vulnerable areas, face layered challenges: water scarcity, stigma, poverty, and exclusion from decision-making. These challenges intensify during environmental and humanitarian crises, where disruptions to livelihoods, displacement, and loss of resources disproportionately affect women and girls and marginalised genders. Even as more governments talk about gender equality and sustainability, menstruation still sits at the margins of climate discussions. Policies may mention gender or the environment, but they rarely connect the two in ways that truly respond to how climate change affects menstruators’ lives.

In Uganda, the impact of a changing climate is clear. Droughts, floods, and erratic rainfall are disrupting access to clean water and sanitation, making it harder for girls and women to manage their periods safely. Uganda’s policies acknowledge gender equality, but in practice, menstrual health remains an afterthought - lost in the gaps between sectors that don’t talk to each other.

In England, the story looks different but carries a similar lesson. The country has stronger infrastructure and policy support - free period products in schools, national equality frameworks, and growing awareness campaigns. Yet, stigma and silence persist, especially for those at the margins: asylum seekers, people experiencing homelessness, and gender-diverse menstruators. The identified issue isn’t just the lack of resources - it’s the lack of connection between systems. Menstrual health is often treated as a social or educational concern, while climate policy sits squarely in the environmental domain. This separation means that climate shocks are rarely seen as part of menstrual health planning, even though their impacts are being felt on the ground. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, when gender is treated as one broad category, we miss how class, race, and migration status shape who is most at risk — and who gets left behind.

Conclusion

Across the different contexts, the message is the same: menstrual health is climate health. The experiences reveal how disasters are not only environmental events but also deeply social and gendered, reinforcing the need for protection, inclusion, and equity within climate and humanitarian responses. Understanding these patterns requires more than a public health approach. It demands an intersectional analysis - a recognition that menstruation is shaped by overlapping structures of gender, class, race, and environment —- and that climate justice must include menstrual justice.

The changing climate is already influencing how people manage their periods, who gets to do so safely, and who must bear the burden when systems fail. As the world faces more extreme weather -  from droughts in East Africa to heatwaves across Europe - here are a few takeaways that can help us make informed choices: 

1. Enhancing the role of communications : This means raising awareness of how climate change impacts menstrual health—through water scarcity, sanitation challenges, or displacement—while centering the voices of those most affected, particularly marginalized communities. By sharing lived experiences through storytelling, campaigns, and digital media can make these connections clearer and more relatable. Engaging diverse platforms such as social media, podcasts, and community radio will help reach both grassroots groups and global stakeholders. Platforms such as Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, X, Bluesky can be widely used to create more dialogues, online campaigns and awareness about the intersectionality of Menstrual Health. This will help enable conversations across all age, gender, class of people globally.

   
   

2. Increasing the role of education and awareness : Education plays a vital role in driving the structural changes needed for a more equitable and sustainable society. Integrating these topics into school curriculum, community programs, and public campaigns can help dismantle stigma, build empathy, and empower people—especially young girls and women—to take informed action. Irise’s Toilet Policy Toolkit stands out as one of the best examples of how education and advocacy can come together to influence policy, promote inclusive infrastructure, and inspire collective change. Ultimately, education becomes a tool not just for knowledge, but for transforming mindsets and fostering shared responsibility toward menstrual and climate justice.

3. Promoting more intersectional collaborations : Promoting more intersectional collaborations means bringing together charities, NGOs, researchers, and practitioners from diverse fields such as public health, science, development, philanthropy, policy, and politics. By working collectively, these actors can bridge knowledge gaps, share resources, and co-create holistic solutions that connect policy, education, and community awareness—leading to more inclusive and sustainable approaches to menstrual and climate justice.

23rd October 2025 - In the first of our Activist Webinar Series, Riya shared her research with the Irise community.