The climate change debate is mostly about the danger to humans, but wildlife is just as threatened, if not more so.
The crisis contributes to the risk of extinction of 12.260 species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently calculated.
These are three women who have dedicated their lives to saving one of those species each - mountain gorillas, Chinese pangolins and leatherback turtles.
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Mountain gorillas
When Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka began working in Bwindi National Park in Uganda in 1996, the number of mountain gorillas was in sharp decline.
But under her care, their fortunes turned: the population increased by two-thirds and now stands at 500.
A similar number live in the Virunga Mountains, further west, including the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The success of Kalema-Zikuoska is one of the reasons why mountain gorillas were changed from "critically endangered" to only "endangered" in 2018 on the IUCN's "red list" of endangered species.
But that didn't let her relax.
Since 1950, the temperature in Uganda has risen at a rate of almost a quarter of a Celsius per decade, causing mountain gorillas to struggle to quench their thirst.
One way to do this is by eating plants with high humidity levels - but these moist plants have become rare and are shifting to other altitudes.
"That could be one of the reasons why gorillas come down more often to the lower parts of the mountain, to people's farms, because of the banana tree trunks, which have a lot of moisture in them. And that led to more frequent clashes with farmers," says Kalema-Zikusoka.
She and her team are now working to expand the national park area, buying more land from farmers, so the gorillas can move freely further up or down the mountain in search of food and water.
Kalema-Zikusoka started working on monkeys while she was a student at the Royal Veterinary College in London in the 1990s and learned that they were threatened by habitat loss and human-caused diseases.
She met the first mountain gorilla named Kacupira while doing fieldwork.
"Vio is very calm and approachable and when I looked into his deep brown eyes, I felt a deep connection," says the 53-year-old, who now lives in Entebbe, not far from the national park.
Shortly after graduating, she became Uganda's first wildlife veterinarian, working with the Uganda National Parks, which became the Uganda Wildlife Authority.
As climate change accelerated, the spread of human diseases to the gorilla population increased.
This is partly the result of higher temperatures, but also drought, because in search of water, people go deeper into the national park and expose the monkeys to their own diseases.
Gorillas have contracted scabies, giardia (a parasite that causes diarrhea), intestinal worms, and respiratory diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) from humans.
The team therefore constantly conducts tests on the gorillas' faeces to monitor their health.
"If we find a worrying infection, we make sure the gorillas are treated," she says.
Now there is concern that gorillas could become infected with malaria, which is becoming more common in the human population as a result of climate change and the increasing number of mosquitoes.
Kaleme-Zikusoke's organization, Conservation through Human Health, helps community health workers reach homes in villages around the national park.
Her mantra is "one health" - in other words, keeping both humans and gorillas healthy so they don't infect each other.
"We believe that if people are healthy, there will be gorillas."
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Pangolins
As a zoology student in Kathmandu in 2008, Tulsi Suval carried her son, then a newborn, on her back to a lecture.
One day, while on fieldwork outside the city, she saw an animal doing the same thing - it was the Chinese pangolin, one of the eight species of nocturnal animals with scales.
"She was doing the same thing I was doing back then," says Suval.
"It was a life-changing experience and I decided to focus on studying this species."
Conservation organizations say pangolins are the biggest poaching targets in the world.
This is mainly because their scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine, although some are eaten.
But now this species, characterized as critically endangered on the IUCN red list, is also threatened by climate change.
In the foothills of the Himalayas, the danger comes from forest fires.
Now more frequent and intense, they destroy surface vegetation and dry out the soil, which kills the ants and termites on which pangolins survive.
Smoke from the fires also enters pangolins' burrows, forcing them to come out into the open even during the day.
"And then either they are caught in poaching or they easily fall prey to predators," says Suval.
The Foundation for the Conservation and Study of Small Mammals, which she founded, therefore focuses on preventing forest fires wherever pangolins can be found in Nepal.
The measures include the creation of firebreaks - strips of land without vegetation that prevent the spread of fire - and replacing them with broad-leaved trees for native conifers to reduce the accumulation of dry leaves on the ground.
"We are helping local communities with the technology and means to collect dry leaves and turn them into compost that they can use for farming," says Suval.
Refilling dried up lakes, via canals connected to nearby rivers or other water sources, has also helped stop wildfires while providing pangolins with precious access to drinking water.
All of this helped to keep the forest floor moist, which ensured that the pangolins would find ants and termites to eat.
For farmers, pangolins do useful work by keeping these pests at bay, so local communities are increasingly supporting Suvala's measures.
"They are completely harmless animals. They just curl up in a ball when they feel threatened, but they can't protect themselves from the consequences of climate change," says Suval.
Leatherback turtles
While Pacific islanders face an existential crisis caused by rising sea levels, Anita Posola has one more concern: how to prevent leatherback turtle eggs from being washed away from the beaches of the Solomon Islands.
The IUCN Red List categorizes the species as globally vulnerable rather than threatened, but one subpopulation in the Western Pacific has declined by 80 percent in recent decades, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Entanglement in fishing gear or deliberate capture by humans for food remain the biggest threats to the leatherback, but storms and rising sea levels are also increasing threats.
It is important for mother turtles to nest above the high tide level to prevent their eggs from being squashed or washed away, but that limit is now steadily increasing.
"It's all very sad. I want to restore the population so that many children can see them in the future," says Posola, a forester at Haevo Kulano Conservation Area in the Solomon Islands.
And that's why when she and her team notice that the turtles are nesting below the highest sea level, they immediately start digging in the sand to save the eggs and move them to a safer place.
"But it's crucial to know where the turtles are nesting, and that becomes a big challenge during night shifts or when the weather is bad," says this thirty-two-year-old woman.
As a child, she wanted to be a nurse and says her current job isn't much different from that.
"I may not be a nurse, but when you work in the turtle hatcheries, protecting the eggs and the baby turtles that are just born there, you feel a little bit like a nurse."
Last November, however, one of the hatcheries provided less protection to the eggs than Posola had hoped for.
A storm surge combined with a high tide covered it and destroyed most of the eggs.
"That was the high point of the beach. We can't move the nests to a higher position than that," says Posola.
Her team then built a protective barrier using sandbags, which has managed to keep the hatchery dry for now.
Rising temperatures are another problem, as heat affects the sex of hatchlings.
If the surrounding sand is above 31,0 degrees Celsius, the young will hatch as females, according to NOAA, while if it is below 27,7 degrees Celsius, they will be males.
Between the two extremes, the result will be a mixture of both sexes.
The danger is that in a warming world, male turtles will become rare, which will lead to a population crash.
For this reason, hatcheries are placed in areas of partial shade, which leads to cooler sand.
But measuring and maintaining the right nest temperature has been a challenge, and foresters are working with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an international conservation organization, to set up the right equipment.
Thanks to foresters, the annual number of leatherback turtle nests in the Posola Conservation Area has more than tripled in 10 years, TNC says, while nest relocation saves the lives of more than 3.000 hatchlings each year.
Anita Posola is proud that so much is being achieved - and these days it's all often done by women.
"Until a few years ago, foresters on the island were all men," she says.
"But now we have an all-female forestry team working day and night."
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