Why Are Women Leaving the US? Yahoo Life Ariana Marsh Tue, Feb17, 2026 Courtney Bowden didn’t leave the United States on a whim. By the time she and her husband moved to Mexico in 2021, the idea had been quietly forming for years. Bowden was living just outside Atlanta then, running a consulting business, surrounded by friends and family. From the outside, her life looked stable: professional traction, community, a home she’d worked hard to build. But beneath that surface, she was reckoning with a more private accounting shaped by racial microaggressions in her neighborhood, neighbors calling the police on her and her husband for reasons that felt both trivial and threatening, and a political climate that was growing increasingly hostile. “I started asking myself if there was any other place in the world where I could exist freely,” she says. “Free from being categorized by my skin color, free from being policed and managed and surveilled. Once I started asking those questions, the wheels started turning.” That reckoning sharpened in 2020. “After [the murder of] George Floyd, I started really reevaluating my life and truly calculating the cost of staying,” says Bowden. “Watching the Black Lives Matter movement erupt alongside a pandemic made it very clear that I needed to make a change. But the questions were there long before that. I had already been wondering if there was any place in the world where I could exist freely.”

Bowden now hosts Black Expat Stories, a podcast documenting the lives of Black Americans who have left the U.S., and is currently writing The Exodus Book, which expands on those conversations. Over time, patterns emerged: lower costs, health care that felt accessible rather than adversarial, and a true sense of safety. Their stories mirror a broader shift. According to a recent Gallup poll, a record share of Americans say they would like to leave the United States permanently, with women under 45 expressing the strongest desire. In 2025, 40 percent of women ages 15 to 44 said they would move abroad permanently if given the opportunity, which is four times the share that said the same in 2014. Gallup also found a 21-point gender gap among younger adults; 40 percent of women, compared to 19 percent of men in the same age range, said they would leave permanently if they could. That increase reflects something more complex than wanderlust. Declining confidence in American institutions, rising costs of living, access to health care, and concerns about safety all correlate strongly with the desire to emigrate. Among younger women, trust in the judicial system has dropped sharply over the past decade, a decline that accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Confidence in the courts among women under 45 fell from 55 percent in 2015 to 32 percent in 2025, more than for any other age group.

For Bowden and Dom Jones, who moved to Taipei in 2024, a newfound sense of safety registered first in the body. Jones had spent years inside American civic life, working in education and politics and running for both Congress and California State Assembly in Orange County, a historically conservative stronghold. She understood America’s political systems intimately and eventually found that proximity to them made their fractures harder to ignore. “I fought hard in America, and I continue to fight in my own way,” she says. “But for me, remaining overseas is the peaceful choice.” In Taiwan, the contrast was immediate. “It felt like I received a big hug from the community,” Jones says, describing what her first time exploring her now hometown of Taipei was like. “It was a hug I didn’t know I needed, and it instantly felt really homey; the people were just so warm and kind and caring.” Treating others with respect and dignity, she adds, is a baseline expectation there.......read on           https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/why-women-leaving-us-202900859.html?utm_source=pushly&ncid=pushly

To a large extent, these floods – particularly in Nigeria – were caused by the release of a dam in neighbouring Cameroon, which flooded large parts of the densely populated Niger delta, home to more than 30 million people. The risk from rainfall is particularly high, both for the people and for local ecosystems and infrastructure such as buildings, bridges, roads and water supply lines..This region is uniquely exposed to weather and natural hazards. A dam was supposed to have been built in the Nigerian part of the delta to hold back the water, but it was never built. Given the poor infrastructure and high rates of poverty, people in this area are particularly vulnerable, affected much more adversely than those in other areas. So how does weather become a disaster? We can’t say exactly how the effects of climate change vary by location and type of weather, but what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk. We’ve learned a lot more in recent years about all aspects of risk. For example, it’s now clear that climate change alters heatwaves far more than other weather phenomena. 

With every study that my team and I perform, we seek to answer the question of what these alterations actually mean for a small section of the global population. In these studies – known as “attribution studies” among experts – we analyse not just historical and current weather data but also information on population density, socioeconomic structures and basically everything we can find about the event itself to gain the most accurate picture of what happened and to whom.Only after all those steps do we ask whether climate change played a role. To do this, we work with various datasets that take into account a vast range of factors – land use, volcanic activity, natural weather variability, greenhouse gas levels, other pollutants, and much more. Broadly speaking, we use climate models to simulate two different worlds: one world with human-caused climate change and one without. We then use various statistical methods to calculate how likely or intense heatwaves are in specific places, both with and without human-caused global warming.

But it is vulnerability and exposure that determine if weather becomes a disaster. The effects of extreme events always depend on the context – who can protect themselves from the weather (and how) is always a major factor. This is why the term “natural disaster” is entirely misplaced......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/18/climate-change-is-not-just-a-problem-of-physics-but-a-crisis-of-justice

“Our study shows that extreme climate impacts are not just the result of abstract global emissions; instead we can directly link them to our lifestyle and investment choices, which in turn are linked to wealth,” said Sarah Schöngart, a climate modelling analyst and the study’s lead author. “We found that wealthy emitters play a major role in driving climate extremes, which provides strong support for climate policies that target the reduction of their emissions.” It has been clearly established that wealthier individuals, through their consumption and investments, create more carbon emissions, while poorer countries located near the equator bear the brunt of the resulting extreme weather and rising temperatures.

The new research attempts to specifically quantify how much that inequality in emissions feeds into climate breakdown. To produce their analysis, the researchers fed wealth-based greenhouse gas emissions inequality assessments into climate modelling frameworks, allowing them to systematically attribute the changes in global temperatures and the frequency of extreme weather events that have taken place between 1990 and 2019. By subtracting the emissions of the wealthiest 10%, 1% and 0.1%, they modelled the changes to the climate and frequency of extreme weather events that would have taken place without them. By comparing those with the changes that have occurred, they believed they would be able to calculate their responsibility for the crisis the world finds itself in today. Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1% – those with annual incomes of €147,200 – responsible for 20% of global heating, and the richest 0.1% – the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than €537,770 – responsible for 8%......read on        https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/07/two-thirds-of-global-heating-caused-by-richest-study-suggests