“While COVID-19 has wreaked havoc the world over, history has proven, and recent data agrees that the hardest hit will be the world’s women and girls and populations already impacted by racism and discrimination,” said Sarah Barnes, Project Director of the Maternal Health Initiative and Women and Gender Advisor at the Wilson Center, at a recent event on the impact of COVID-19 on race and gender inequities. Coronavirus has hurt women and girls in many ways. Among them, women have been pushed back into the home.  And healthcare workers and caregivers who are mostly women are jeopardizing their own health, caring for others.

Refugees and migrants are the most vulnerable and will bear the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic, said James Hollifield, a Wilson Center Global Fellow, in a recent episode of Wilson NOW. These populations are often already at higher risk due to insufficient water and food supplies, and those confined in large camps are at greater risk of spreading the disease. According to Hollifield, although we have not yet seen the full extent of the damage, “we can see with both refugees and migrants in particular, especially seasonal migrants, that there’s a great danger here of the virus spreading like wildfire in the camps and in the dormitories.”

At an event organized by the Coalition of Atoll Nations on Climate Change in December 2019, Tabitha Awerika, 21, from Kiribati, urged world leaders to listen to the climate science and to the pleas of those living in the South Pacific. “I will not leave the lands of my ancestors,” she said. “I will not abandon my motherland. I refuse to leave the only place I call home.”

“The only certainty is uncertainty,” Pliny the Elder reportedly said. Though all historical times are full of uncertainties, some seem more so than others. This is one of those times.

A major slowdown of the Indian economy was brewing and completely spilled over when I got to India in September 2019 to start my dissertation fieldwork on Indian women construction workers’ experiences and conceptualizations of Human Security. Wages stagnated. Consumer spending fell. Construction, real estate, and other industries were sent reeling. Construction workers’ livelihoods were teetering on the brink. Uncertainty became the backbone of their existence.

In the Global South, climate change-induced resettlement requires a holistic and integrated approach, involving all stakeholders—state institutions, local customary and civil society institutions—and in particular respectful engagement with local traditional actors and networks. In a policy brief for the Toda Peace Institute, we examined climate change-induced resettlement from the Carteret Islands in the Pacific, a case which encompasses a broad range of issues relevant to future relocation efforts elsewhere. Those who seek to make this type of resettlement possible would do well to heed these lessons.