The world just got its first shared scoreboard for protecting mothers and babies from extreme heat

Heat harms the youngest first: extreme heat raises the odds of preterm birth by about 26%, and babies under one now face 389% more heatwave days than babies did in the late twentieth century, with 1.5 billion children exposed. Yet most countries do not even count these harms in the same way. This week WHO, the World Meteorological Organization, UNICEF and UNFPA launched the first global framework of priority indicators to track heat's effects on pregnant women, newborns and children — a shared scoreboard so health systems can see the risk coming and act on it. What gets measured, the agencies argue, gets protected.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: institutional program