Abstract for: Identifying gender-specific variables of climate change-related health impacts in the Lake Chilwa basin in Malawi.

Climate change threatens not just individual health but the entire global health system, preying on those that are the most vulnerable and further deepening the existing health inequities around the world. Several factors define the magnitude and type of health risk, of which gender is one of the most critical and yet one of the least investigated. The Chilwa Basin in southern Malawi is one such region where climate change is playing a significant role on gender and health in intensifying the already burgeoning pressures of population growth and acute poverty with severe consequences on human health and well-being. Using the "Complex Adaptive Systems Theory" as a theoretical framework, the research aims to investigate, and model key variables and their apparent causal patterns within and across four sub-systems, (i) food security; (ii) ecological services, (iii) communicable and non-communicable diseases and (iv) extreme weather events and their health impacts of climate change on gender through causal loop diagrams and agent-based modelling using Vensim and AnyLogic softwares. The data will be collected from the Lake Chilwa basin using community participatory methods.