Who cares for the climate? Women’s unpaid labor is holding up the world

I, Ezgi, grew up in a Turkish coal mining town where the economy ran on two fuels: coal, and my mother's unpaid labor. My father went underground as a mining engineer. My mother stayed above ground and kept our home running, managing the household, caring for me and elderly relatives, stretching every resource when times got hard. My mother's labor made my father's job possible. Her work was invisible, uncompensated, essential.

I, Katy, have spent years supporting human development across the lifespan and documenting what feminist economics reveals and traditional models overlook: care systems don't just support economies, they are the very foundation that economies are built upon.

These personal and professional experiences led us to embark on a research agenda focusing on the intersectional nexus of care, climate change, and gender in Eastern and Southern Africa, supported by the Early Learning Partnership. As global leaders wrapped up negotiations in Belém at COP30, our research exposed one devastating pattern: the invisible force keeping communities alive through climate disasters, and through fossil fuel transitions, is care work, performed overwhelmingly by women and counted by no one.

What We’re Learning

At the World Bank's Social Policy Team, we've worked closely with countries across Eastern and Southern Africa, and  seen firsthand that climate change is  a story of rising temperatures, but it is also a story about people, about inequality, and about resilience.

Our work has revealed a persistent gap in how we understand and respond to climate crises: the invisible force that actually keeps communities alive through climate disasters is care work, performed overwhelmingly by women. When disasters strike, whether drought, flood, or extreme heat, women are first to respond. They sacrifice income generation when care duties multiply, absorbing the shock that would otherwise crash households and local economies. This invisible labor translates directly into GDP, yet climate finance mechanisms overlook it.

The same pattern holds true for climate mitigation. When communities transition away from fossil fuels, women's unpaid labor again becomes the shock absorber. In coal mining regions, as men lose jobs in the mines, women intensify their care work to hold families and communities together. They stretch household budgets, manage food insecurity, and absorb the social costs of economic disruption, all while remaining excluded from decision-making about transition strategies and policies. Current “just transition” solutions risk replicating and reinforcing these inequities, if they fail to account for or compensate the care work that makes energy transitions economically viable.

Our research agenda starts to show something striking. Caregivers’ well-being doesn’t just affect how children cope with crisis, it influences entire communities and national economies. Yet care work remains excluded from economic accounting and climate finance decisions.

Why This Matters

What keeps us up at night is this: the same economic systems that emit greenhouse gases rely on women’s unpaid labor to absorb the consequences, whether responding to climate disasters or managing the impacts of decarbonization. Current “green” solutions often replicate and reinforce these inequities. Women who hold families, communities, and markets together are most often left out of decisions that shape recovery and resilience strategies. Caregivers are the defacto shock absorbers of climate change. Their work is invisible. The economic systems we use to measure climate impacts don’t count care.

Think about it: when health systems fail during extreme heat events, who cares for the sick? When schools close due to flooding, who watches the children? When food prices spike during drought, who makes meals stretch further? The answer is always the same and it’s almost always unpaid.

What We’re Working Toward

Through our research, we’re working to develop mechanisms that value care work. We’re advocating to position care infrastructure as climate adaptation, because it is care that enables adaptation. When we assess climate vulnerability, we need to ask: Who’s absorbing the shock? Whose labor is making “resilience” possible?

Belém, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, offers a powerful reminder. Indigenous communities, particularly Indigenous women, have practiced environmental stewardship for generations, knowledge systems that western institutions are only beginning to recognize. We need the same humility when it comes to understanding the role of care in climate adaptation.

The Path Forward

Climate finance must evolve to count care. This means including care work in economic accounting, designing climate interventions that reduce rather than increase care burdens, and ensuring women caregivers shape the decisions that affect their lives.

The stability of markets and economies depends on it. More importantly, the well-being of billions of people depends on it.