Adolescence is a critical period for reproductive health, wellbeing, and future life opportunities. Yet adolescents often face significant barriers to accurate information, protective services, bodily autonomy, and confidential, youth-friendly care. This Collection seeks to highlight research on adolescent reproductive health, agency, and protection, particularly in settings where gender inequality, poverty, stigma, restrictive norms, harmful practices, limited health system capacity, and intersecting forms of exclusion shape young people's reproductive choices, safety, and outcomes.

Progress in adolescent sexual and reproductive health has been driven by investments in comprehensive sexuality education, youth-friendly services, prevention of child marriage and female genital cutting, and gender-transformative programming. However, major challenges persist, including adolescent pregnancy, interpersonal violence (intimate partner violence, dating violence, family violence, sexual coercion, and peer violence), unmet need for services, school dropout, harmful practices, and limited autonomy in decision-making. Adolescents affected by displacement, disability, poverty, humanitarian crises, migration, ethnic minority status, or social marginalization may face compounding and intersecting risks that require tailored, context-sensitive, inclusive, and equity-oriented responses.

A growing body of evidence emphasizes the importance of adolescent agency, empowerment, and resilience as both outcomes and protective factors. Interventions that adopt gender-transformative approaches, utilize social and behavior change communication, address intersecting inequalities, and actively engage young people in design and implementation show promise in shifting harmful norms and improving health outcomes. Continued research is needed to understand how different intervention modalities affect adolescent reproductive health, safety, and empowerment across diverse contexts and among adolescents who are often underserved or excluded from mainstream services.

Future studies may evaluate multi-component interventions that integrate education, health services, community engagement, legal protection, economic strengthening, and social norm change. Evidence generated with meaningful adolescent participation and grounded in local realities will be essential to design services and programs that are acceptable, inclusive, effective, and sustainable.

In this Collection, we invite submissions covering a range of topics, including but not limited to:

Reproductive Health and Services

• Adolescent pregnancy prevention, care, support, and social consequences
• Access to contraception, counselling, and youth-friendly reproductive health services
• Comprehensive sexuality education and school-based reproductive health interventions
• Menstrual health, school participation, and adolescent wellbeing

Harmful Practices and Violence

• Female genital cutting/mutilation: prevalence, consequences, prevention, and support for affected adolescents
• Child marriage prevention and response
• Interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence, family violence, sexual coercion, and peer violence
• Linkages between violence, harmful practices, and reproductive health outcomes

Agency, Empowerment, and Resilience

• Adolescent agency, decision-making, and reproductive autonomy
• Resilience, coping strategies, and protective factors among adolescents facing adversity
• Gender-transformative interventions and approaches
• Social and behavior change communication strategies targeting adolescents, families, and communities

Intervention Research and Implementation

• Multi-component and integrated intervention models
• Community-based, school-based, health facility-based, and digital interventions
• Intervention effectiveness across different contexts and populations, including adolescents living with disabilities, migrants, ethnic minorities, and other socially marginalized groups
• Implementation science and scale-up of evidence-based programs

Equity and Context

• Adolescent reproductive health in humanitarian, displacement, migrant, and low-resource settings
• Intersecting vulnerabilities: disability, poverty, migration status, ethnic minority status, social marginalization, and other forms of exclusion
• Participatory and adolescent-centered research methodologies, including inclusive approaches that meaningfully engage adolescents from socially marginalized populations

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 3, Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 5, Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

All submissions in this Collection undergo the journal’s standard peer review process. Similarly, all manuscripts authored by a Guest Editor(s) will be handled by the Editor-in-Chief. As an open access publication, this journal levies an article processing fee. We recognize that many key stakeholders may not have access to such resources and are committed to supporting participation in this issue wherever resources are a barrier. For more information about what support may be available, please visit OA funding and support, or email OAfundingpolicy@springernature.com or the Editor-in-Chief.

Climate change and environmental degradation are increasingly recognised as urgent threats to reproductive health and rights. Extreme heat, floods, droughts, air pollution, food insecurity, displacement and exposure to environmental toxins can affect fertility, pregnancy outcomes, access to care, gender-based violence, menstrual health and reproductive decision-making. This Collection seeks to advance evidence on how climate and environmental exposures shape reproductive health across diverse populations, with particular attention to low-resource and climate-vulnerable settings.

Growing evidence suggests that climate-related events can disrupt reproductive health services, including contraception, abortion care, antenatal care, safe delivery and postnatal support. Environmental exposures such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, pesticides, microplastics and air pollution may also affect reproductive physiology, fertility and pregnancy outcomes. While epidemiological evidence continues to grow, the biological mechanisms linking climate and environmental exposures to reproductive and pregnancy outcomes remain insufficiently understood. Research exploring pathways such as heat stress, inflammation, oxidative stress, placental dysfunction and epigenetic changes could help strengthen the evidence base and identify opportunities for intervention. Yet research remains fragmented, and many areas, including contraception, abortion care, reproductive cancers, adolescent reproductive health and community adaptation, remain underexplored.

Continued research at the intersection of climate, environment and reproductive health could inform more resilient health systems and more inclusive climate adaptation strategies. Future studies may integrate epidemiology, implementation science, environmental monitoring, participatory methods, mechanistic research and policy analysis to clarify risks and identify effective interventions. As climate change intensifies, reproductive health must be recognised not only as a health priority but also as a central component of climate justice.

In this Collection, we invite submissions covering a range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Climate-related events and maternal, newborn and reproductive health outcomes
• Extreme heat, air pollution and environmental exposures in relation to fertility and pregnancy
• Climate change, contraception access, abortion care and reproductive health service disruption
• Gender-based violence, early marriage, migration and reproductive vulnerability in climate-affected settings
• Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, pesticides, PFAS, microplastics and reproductive outcomes
• Community-led adaptation and climate-resilient reproductive health services
• Integration of reproductive health into climate policy, disaster preparedness and health system planning
• Mechanistic studies examining how climate and environmental exposures influence reproductive physiology, fertility, placental function and pregnancy outcomes

All submissions in this Collection undergo the journal’s standard peer review process. Similarly, all manuscripts authored by a Guest Editor(s) will be handled by the Editor-in-Chief. As an open access publication, this journal levies an article processing fee. We recognize that many key stakeholders may not have access to such resources and are committed to supporting participation in this issue wherever resources are a barrier. For more information about what support may be available, please visit OA funding and support, or email OAfundingpolicy@springernature.com or the Editor-in-Chief.