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Extreme climatic events are increasing in frequency, leading to hotter temperatures, flooding, droughts, severe storms, and rising oceans. This special issue brings together a collection of seven articles that describe the impacts of extreme climatic events on a diverse set of human biology and health outcomes. The first two articles cover extreme temperatures extending from extreme heat to cold and changes in winter weather and the respective implications for adverse health events, human environmental limits, well‐being, and human adaptability. Next, two articles cover the effects of exposures to extreme storms through an examination of hurricanes and cyclones on stress and birth outcomes. The following two articles describe the effects of extreme flooding events on livelihoods, nutrition, water and food insecurity, diarrheal and respiratory health, and stress. The last article examines the effects of drought on diet and food insecurity. Following a brief review of each extreme climatic event and articles covered in this special issue, I discuss future research opportunities–highlighting domains of climate change and specific research questions that are ripe for biological anthropologists to investigate. I close with a description of interdisciplinary methods to assess climate exposures and human biology outcomes to aid the investigation of the defining question of our time – how climate change will affect human biology and health. Ultimately, climate change is a water, food, and health problem. Human biologists offer a unique perspective for a combination of theoretical, methodological, and applied reasons and thus are in a prime position to contribute to this critical research agenda.

Understanding factors contributing to variation in ‘biological age’ is essential to understanding variation in susceptibility to disease and functional decline. One factor that could accelerate biological aging in women is reproduction. Pregnancy is characterized by extensive, energetically-costly changes across numerous physiological systems. These ‘costs of reproduction’ may accumulate with each pregnancy, accelerating biological aging. Despite evidence for costs of reproduction using molecular and demographic measures, it is unknown whether parity is linked to commonly-used clinical measures of biological aging. We use data collected between 1999 and 2010 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 4418) to test whether parity (number of live births) predicted four previously-validated composite measures of biological age and system integrity: Levine Method, homeostatic dysregulation, Klemera–Doubal method biological age, and allostatic load. Parity exhibited a U-shaped relationship with accelerated biological aging when controlling for chronological age, lifestyle, health-related, and demographic factors in post-menopausal, but not pre-menopausal, women, with biological age acceleration being lowest among post-menopausal women reporting between three and four live births. Our findings suggest a link between reproductive function and physiological dysregulation, and allude to possible compensatory mechanisms that buffer the effects of reproductive function on physiological dysregulation during a woman’s reproductive lifespan. Future work should continue to investigate links between parity, menopausal status, and biological age using targeted physiological measures and longitudinal studies.