Yale Daily News

A hurricane levels buildings in a coastal neighborhood. Flooding wipes away a village. Fires decimate homes, leaving only the burnt shells. Drought causes a year of crops to wither. 

Outside, homes are fractured. Inside, relationships, bearing the invisible stresses of the heat, crumble, too.

“Climate change exacerbates mental health stressors, especially among populations facing displacement, food insecurity and economic instability due to environmental shocks,” Kaveh Khoshnood SPH ’89 GRD ’95, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote to the News.

Khoshnood’s work at the Humanitarian Research Lab — or HRL — investigates the impact of war, forced migration and environmental shocks on health outcomes in vulnerable populations.

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, climate change is considered a “serious aggravator of gender-based violence” and increases the risk of domestic violence. Economic strain, displacement and social isolation, as well as psychological distress, are mechanisms by which climate change accelerates intimate partner violence incidents, Khoshnood mentioned.

“[The] loss of livelihoods due to climate disasters can increase financial dependence, reducing women’s ability to leave abusive relationships,” Khoshnood said.

Countries that have experienced recent, acute weather events — such as cyclones, flooding, heat waves and droughts — have a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence, according to a recent paper published in the journal, PLOS Climate.

“For this particular project, we look[ed] at upstream global issues and how those play into violence as a downstream factor,” said Abigail Hatcher, an associate professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health. 

The paper drew data on intimate partner violence from a variety of pre-existing databases and merged this with the Emergency Events Database, a global list of climate shocks. 

The World Health Organization and other organizations often conduct household interviews as part of the survey procedure. Questions for women ask if they’ve experienced any physical or sexual violence from a husband or partner in the last 12 months.

“When extreme weather happens, it has this immediate physiological effect on your body, obviously, but also how your nervous system is responding,” Hatcher said. “Extreme weather will always have a gendered effect.”

According to Hatcher, hunger leads to more impulsive, violent actions, as anxiety responses might be heightened.

Additionally, there are the added social factors if a household doesn’t have food, and how it might reflect on them within their community, Hatcher says.

A 2023 study led by Dr. Pooja Agrawal, a global health specialist at the School of Medicine, examined the interplay between climate change, food insecurity and gender-based violence.

The authors wrote that climate shocks strain food production and transportation infrastructure and impact how vulnerable populations access food. When people lose the ability to make their livelihoods, this can have significant negative effects on societal dynamics.

The Yale study alluded to several case studies in which climate change worsened livelihoods. The 1998 floods that decimated infrastructure in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, led to an increase in food prices and a lack of safe drinking water. With rampant unemployment and rising tensions, domestic violence incidents rose. 

In 1997, a drought brought food insecurity to the Hawa people, a farming population in Papua New Guinea. The Hawa responded to resulting food insecurity with an increase in “witch killings,” or violence predominantly targeted at women. 

In Senegal and Ghana, a similar phenomenon of increased sexual violence — including rape, forced prostitution and early marriage of girls — was observed in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards.

Patriarchal societies play into this gendered experience of a disaster. These effects impact who picks up labor during recovery efforts or bears the abuse at home.

Bryn Redal SPH ’25, a research assistant at the Yale Program for Climate Change Communication, said that climate change “alters human behavior both directly and indirectly” by driving economic instability, food and water insecurity and increasing mental health stressors.

“Rising food prices and resource scarcity can alter dietary habits and migration decisions, while food insecurity has been linked to increased aggression and intimate partner violence,” Redal wrote to the News. “Climate anxiety, displacement, and loss of livelihoods contribute to heightened stress, depression, and social unrest, influencing political engagement and community dynamics.”

In the future, research could explore regional differences, as some climate shocks may have stronger effects on domestic violence in low-income countries where social protections are weaker, said Khoshnood.

He also thinks it would be valuable to incorporate qualitative data — such as survivor narratives — to better understand how climate change exacerbates domestic violence risks at a community level.

“The study reinforces the urgent need for climate resilience strategies that incorporate gender-based violence prevention,” Khoshnood said.

Hatcher is, however, worried about the future of this research. Last week, the Trump Administration moved to end the U.S. Agency for International Development, which runs a data collection agency called the Demographic and Health Surveys, from which the study authors drew data.

“The world will no longer have data about country wealth, estimates of health and social factors like intimate partner violence,” Hatcher said. 

The Demographic and Health Surveys has population and health data from over 400 surveys conducted in over 90 countries.