Reframing climate disasters through the lens of a climate necropolitics of health

A climate necropolitics of health offers a critical framework that illuminates how climate change disproportionately harms marginalized populations by highlighting how the lives of certain individuals are protected and whose lives are expendable. We demonstrate how entrenched gender inequity, colonial legacies and systemic underinvestment in health and education have had negative health impacts for women and girls in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. We propose that a climate necropolitics of health asks us to move beyond seeing climate disasters as an isolated event, instead locating them in broader histories of environmental injustice, structural violence and social exclusion.