By Dayna Evans

The world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on women’s global equality is happening this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Women Deliver, which opened its fourth edition on Monday, is the largest meeting of advocates for women and girls in the world since its last occurrence in 2013. The conference is held every three years (the previous one took place in Malaysia), and it’s no coincidence that this year it found its home in Denmark, which was recently voted the best place in the world to be a woman. Must be nice.

I’m here as a fellow on behalf of the U.N. Foundation and an eager consumer of the panels, meetings, cultural events, and strategic sessions that focus on the empowerment and enlightenment of women across the globe. Each day, in addition to stories that come out of the meetings, the Cut will share a handful of details, sound bites, and pieces of valuable information that come to light during the course of the conference’s events. Here is a dispatch from day one.

Climate change is a women’s issue. One of the hot-button topics at this year’s Women Deliver is climate change, which is starting to be acknowledged as an issue that disproportionately affects women. A reportpublished by the U.N.’s Population Fund found that women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men in natural disasters. Women are more frequently first responders than men because women are more likely to be in the home when disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other climate-change-related disasters strike.

Oftentimes, issues seemingly disconnected from women (like roads and town infrastructure) can be a cause of maternal mortality. Jerker Liljestrand, an OB/GYN and a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explained that “roads have an effect on maternal health.” Every day, according to the WHO, 830 women die from preventable causes related to childbirth and pregnancy, and 99 percent of those women live in developing countries. Liljestrand said one of the reasons for the high rate of maternal mortality is that poorly paved roads that connect women in rural areas to health facilities in more populated areas can be a fatal obstacle. If a woman is having complications during childbirth and must be transported to a safer facility than her home, poor roads may cause dangerous issues.