Women unpaid care work is the invisible force sustaining families, communities, and even national economies as climate change accelerates disasters and social stress across the globe. New research highlighted on PreventionWeb reveals that while climate debates focus on emissions, finance, and technology, the real shock absorbers of climate crises are women whose labour remains unpaid, uncounted, and largely ignored by policy.
The authors, Ezgi Canpolat and Katy Aní, draw from personal histories and years of development research to show how care work forms the foundation of resilience. Canpolat recalls growing up in a Turkish coal-mining town where her father worked underground while her mother managed everything above ground. From caring for children and elderly relatives to stretching scarce resources, her mother’s unpaid labour made the household, and the mining economy itself, function. That labour was essential, yet invisible.
Aní’s work in feminist economics reinforces the same truth: care systems do not merely support economies, they enable them. Together, the researchers examined the intersection of care, climate change, and gender in Eastern and Southern Africa. As global leaders concluded negotiations at COP30 in Belém, their findings pointed to a stark reality. Whether communities are hit by floods, droughts or heatwaves, or are navigating transitions away from fossil fuels, it is women’s unpaid care work that keeps societies standing.
How Climate Crises Expose the Invisible Workforce
Through close work with governments in Eastern and Southern Africa, the researchers found that climate change is not only a story of rising temperatures but also one of inequality and resilience. When disasters strike, women are often the first responders within households. They care for the sick during heatwaves, manage families when schools close due to floods, and sacrifice paid work when care responsibilities multiply. By absorbing these shocks, women prevent household and local economic collapse.
Despite this, climate finance mechanisms and economic accounting systems fail to recognise the value of this labour. Although unpaid care work directly supports productivity and stability, it is excluded from GDP calculations and climate investment decisions.
The same pattern emerges during climate mitigation and energy transitions. In coal-mining regions, when men lose jobs as economies move away from fossil fuels, women’s unpaid labour expands to hold families together. They manage food shortages, shrinking incomes, and emotional strain, all while remaining excluded from decisions about transition policies. The research warns that without recognising and compensating care work, so-called “just transitions” risk deepening gender inequality.
Why Counting Care Is Central to Climate Justice
The authors argue that today economic systems depend on women’s unpaid labour to absorb the consequences of both climate disasters and decarbonisation. Green policies that ignore care burdens often reinforce existing inequities, leaving the very people who sustain resilience without a voice in recovery planning.
Simple questions reveal the scale of the issue. When hospitals are overwhelmed during extreme heat, who cares for patients at home? When drought drives up food prices, who makes meals last longer? The answer is almost always women, and the work is almost always unpaid.
Looking ahead, the researchers are advocating for a shift in how climate vulnerability and adaptation are understood. Care infrastructure, they argue, should be treated as climate adaptation itself. True resilience planning must ask who is absorbing shocks and whose labour is making survival possible.
Belém, situated at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, offers a broader lesson. Indigenous communities, especially Indigenous women, have practised environmental stewardship for generations, long before formal climate frameworks existed. The same respect and recognition must be extended to care work in climate policy.
The path forward, the authors conclude, requires climate finance systems that count care. This means valuing unpaid labour in economic models, designing climate responses that reduce care burdens rather than increase them, and ensuring women caregivers have a central role in decision-making. The stability of economies, and the well-being of billions, depends on finally making the invisible visible.