Professor Tiziana Leone Calls for Better Measures of Women’s and Children’s Health in Crisis Settings

A new invited commentary by Professor Tiziana Leone, Professor in Health and International Development and Director of the LSE Middle East Centre, published in the BMJ, argues that current approaches to measuring women’s and children’s health fail to capture the long-term impacts of overlapping climate and conflict crises.

In the article, Professor Leone highlights how climate change and conflict increasingly interact to create complex humanitarian emergencies, affecting health through displacement, food insecurity, environmental hazards, disrupted healthcare systems, and increased vulnerability to violence. While humanitarian data collection often focuses on immediate indicators such as maternal mortality, immunisation, and access to healthcare, she argues that these measures overlook the lasting consequences of crisis on women’s and children’s wellbeing.

Drawing on a life-course perspective, Professor Leone calls for greater attention to how repeated shocks affect health across different stages of life, from pregnancy and early childhood to adolescence, mid-life, and older age. She notes that the effects of disrupted nutrition, healthcare, education, and social support can accumulate over time and across generations, shaping long-term outcomes for both women and children.

The commentary also highlights significant gaps in the evidence base. Professor Leone argues for stronger investment in longitudinal and linked datasets that bring together health, climate, conflict, displacement, and demographic information. Such approaches, she suggests, would help researchers and policymakers better understand how compounded crises influence health trajectories over time and improve responses in humanitarian and climate-affected settings.

Professor Leone concludes that without a broader and more inclusive approach to data collection, many of the cumulative health impacts experienced by women and children in crisis settings will remain poorly understood and insufficiently addressed.

Read the full commentary: We need better ways to measure women’s and children’s health together, across time, and across crisis affected settings.