The weight of care: the unseen toll of climate change on women’s lives

Alina Ojha, Anna Yalouris

November 25, 2024

Nothing happens in isolation. Many of the readily visible impacts of climate change lead to higher rates of intimate partner violence and other forms of physical harm for women and girls. With climate change often comes reduced agricultural yields, increased food security, and extreme weather events. These can increase economic tensions within households, disrupt social structures and weaken protective community networks, creating a devastating link between climate change and gender-based violence (GBV). While GBV on its own is a critical issue that rightfully receives attention, the effects of climate change significantly exacerbate ‘time poverty’ by increasing the demand on women’s time for care and domestic work. This is often missing in the discourse on climate change.

In societies worldwide women perform a majority of care and domestic work, placing a large strain on the limited time available to them and reversing progress made in empowering women and girls outside the home. This difference carries even more significant consequences in low-income countries where the devastating impacts of climate change are most pronounced. Data from India and Pakistan suggests that women already spend as much as ten times as many hours on domestic labor as men. With these same impacts of climate change fueling greater demands on mothers’ time in and outside the home, girls find themselves under societal pressure to leave school and assume additional caregiving roles. Despite efforts to integrate gender perspectives into climate research, there remains a significant gap in solutions for transforming the unequal structure of care and domestic work.

In this piece we look to broaden the conversation in climate change discourse beyond gender based violence and towards including the crucial role of transforming care relations as part of our global response to climate change, opening up avenues for exploration and action. Integrating gender perspectives and recognizing the disproportionate impacts of unpaid care work can enrich our overall climate response by ensuring a more holistic approach that values time, opportunity, access, and happiness. We can strengthen community resilience and safeguard the progress made towards gender equality over the past 20 years by focusing on structures, policies, and programs that help women balance and manage the growing responsibilities of care work.

How does climate change increase care & domestic work?

The responsibility of unpaid care work has historically amplified women’s vulnerability. Historically, unpaid labor has often excluded women from formal education and economic opportunities, a situation aggravated by social and cultural norms that designate women as primary household caretakers. This exclusion limits their financial independence and ties their roles closely to resource management activities such as fetching water, gathering firewood, and small-scale farming. All of these activities have become more challenging or time-consuming with the onset of changing climate patterns. These roles also place women directly in contact with the environment, making them the first to experience climate-related disruptions.

Water scarcity, intensified by climate change induced drought, adds extra workload for the women who collect water as they need to spend more time traveling longer distances to reach viable water sources. In Mozambique, women used to spend up to 2 hours a day collecting water for household needs. However, during the current drought, brought about by El Niño, this has been stretched to over 6 hours. In response, many families have pulled younger girls from school to assist with the demanding task of finding and transporting water. In regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, this journey can also be dangerous, exposing them to violence and other risks.

With natural disasters women become responsible for caring for the injured, managing psychological trauma within families, and leading home and community rebuilding efforts. These duties compound their existing unpaid care work. Following hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, women were predominantly seen rebuilding their homes at the same time as catering to their families’ immediate needs. A similar scenario unfolded during COVID-19, with women stepping up to care for their families amidst critical infrastructure challenges. These instances underscore how women’s unpaid care work consistently acts as a critical ‘shock absorber’ in crises, a role that will be equally pivotal in extreme climate events.

During extreme heat as labor shifts to night work to avoid scorching daytime temperatures, women are less able to accommodate changes in the timing of employment expectations and more likely to drop out of the workforce or suffer a reduction in income. Women in India currently lose 19% of their paid working hours due to heat, which impacts the economy by 0.8% of its GDP, or about $67 billion each year. By 2050, this figure is expected to rise to 22% of paid working hours lost, costing 1% of India’s GDP, or roughly $250 billion annually. Women are also, on average, more vulnerable to negative health impacts when exposed to high temperatures, yet have a compounded burden of unpaid care work when extreme heat events increase the likelihood of illnesses and death within their family and community.

The increased care work’s ripple effects also significantly impact female children, who often assume additional responsibilities when their mothers are overwhelmed. Necessity finds these girls caring for younger siblings, cooking, and managing household duties. This early diversion of their time and energy compounds time poverty at a young age, and impacts their education and personal growth. As they are funneled into traditional caregiver roles, their future economic independence and empowerment are further restricted, trapping them in an intergenerational cycle of limited opportunities.

Early solutions to reduce care & domestic work show promise, but major gaps persist

Finding a long-term solution that will shift norms and narratives to achieve an equitable distribution of care work, while essential, may prove challenging in certain cultural contexts. Interventions and policies should urgently aim to reduce the overall load of care and domestic responsibilities on women and girls. We collaborated with Kore Global, Intellecap, and Core Women to help identify the most effective time- and labor-saving technologies and interventions used by businesses to reduce, recognize, reward, and redistribute care work. In this research we identified, profiled, and conducted a systematic review of the care economy business through an initiative supported by IDRC. The project mapped 165 care-economy businesses across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of the different products and services.

Businesses such as Tierra Grata , provide solar panels, water filters, and ecological dry toilets in rural villages of Colombia, addressing challenges related to access to energy and water by reducing the time and effort needed to fetch water and firewood. Likewise, Bidhaa Sasa, BURN, and Powerstove offer labor-saving technologies such as efficient cookstoves (and/or biomass fuels) that not only reduce health risks from indoor pollution but also shorten cooking time. Other businesses, like Nazava , provide affordable ceramic water filters in Indonesia and Kenya that lessen the burden of collecting fuel for boiling water and reduce the risks of waterborne diseases. Women who use these products report significant improvement in their lives – not only through reduced time and physical effort in household tasks but also in areas such as increased financial independence, quality of life, availability of more free time, and overall happiness.

The development of time- and labor-saving technologies offers one source of relief from the time poverty that women and girls face. However, technology alone will not suffice to solve this. Effective strategies for redistributing and reducing the care and domestic workload, especially in the context of changing climate, remain underdeveloped. While options may be limited during extreme events like tropical storms, anticipatory research focusing on pre- and post-disaster strategies is essential.

Bogotá’s Care Blocks offer an inspiring model of innovative solutions cities facing climate challenges today could implement. These neighborhoods centralize essential services – such as laundry facilities, high school courses, and childcare centers – within a 20 to 30 minute walking distance. This structure allows women to pursue education or employment by reducing the time and effort required for daily care and domestic tasks.

Building resilient communities that incorporate care as essential infrastructure must be tailored to each community’s unique needs. Designing caregiver – and domestic worker-friendly spaces and cities requires deep contextual knowledge. What works as a Care Block in Bogotá may look very different in Nairobi. This underscores the importance of continuous and inclusive research to expand our understanding of how these initiatives can be adapted and optimized for various settings. The reality is that we don’t know enough. We need to commit to learning more if we are to create meaningful, scalable solutions.

If you are interested in exploring our work on the care economy or discussing the role of research – particularly applied behavioral science – in addressing the unequal care responsibilities intensified by climate change, reach out to us – the time is now!

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