(Illustration by Chris Gash)
The 66th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women closed in March this year. The session’s theme was “Climate Change, Environment, Disaster Risk Reduction.” It acknowledged the disproportionate harm that women and girls will experience from climate change, as well as the central role they will play in achieving sustainable development.
While the session’s claims are true and important, a new report by Oxfam argues that without a central focus on care work within this agenda, efforts aimed at the nexus of climate change and gender could end up entrenching gender inequality rather than addressing it.
“Care work” refers to the daily and generational labor that human beings undertake to renew and sustain life, societies, and environments. It includes paid and unpaid work in the direct care of persons (e.g., bathing, feeding, and attending to psychological well-being), as well as the indirect activities that provide the necessary conditions for caregiving (e.g., cooking, cleaning, and shopping). Care work is largely invisible compared with the “productive,” generally monetizable, aspects of work, which tend to dominate public policy. No hard boundaries exist between care and productive work, and the same people engage in both.
Care work tends to be carried out disproportionately by women and girls the world over. Survey data indicate that women and girls tend to work more total hours than men, because of the added responsibility the former take for care tasks. And since care work goes undervalued, women see their chances for achieving economic and political equality constrained. They have little time left over to engage in income generation or in activities such as education, civic participation, and leisure.
The resulting deprivations constitute the “care crisis,” according to academics, feminist organizations, and an increasing number of mainstream groups, including the United Nations and the World Bank. While some evidence indicates that the currently unequal distribution of care work within societies and households is improving, climate change will likely compound the existing care crisis. We can no longer afford to address the unjust impacts of climate change without simultaneously addressing disparities in care work.
Mitigation and Adaptation Efforts
The impacts of climate change on the care crisis will manifest through three pathways. First, climate change will increase the amount of care work that needs to be done. For example, increased frequency of extreme weather will result in increased human injury, disease, malnutrition, and psychological distress, all of which will increase the need for care.
Second, climate change makes care work more difficult to provide. For example, carers suffering hunger, illness, physical pain, or psychological stress will be less able to engage in care work. Further extreme weather may disrupt the infrastructure that undergirds care work (e.g., schools, hospitals, water, and sanitation infrastructure), which will, in turn, make providing care more arduous.
Third, climate change threatens to compound the injustices that already exist around the unequal responsibility for care work. For example, women face the risk of being sexually assaulted when venturing far from home to fetch water and fuel. Should climate change result in the need to travel longer distances to collect water and fuel, it will only compound the risk of gender-based violence. Furthermore, World Bank data suggest a growing number of female-headed households among low- and lower-middle-income countries—a possible outcome of worsening climatic conditions and norms regarding male outmigration. Should established patriarchal norms persist in the areas where male household members have left, such that women’s access and control of communal resources is limited, the productive tasks of female-headed households become more arduous, dramatically compounding the current injustices surrounding their disproportionate responsibility for care work.
The role of climate change in exacerbating the care crisis is anticipated to be most acute among the approximately two billion people living in low-income countries and engaged in subsistence agriculture. These populations tend to have the least access to care-providing infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals, running water, and electricity. They must also undertake additional burdens in the form of environmental care—for example, tending to community gardens, maintaining forest resources, and sustaining social networks that are essential to subsistence livelihoods. The damaging impacts of climate change stand to make many of these care tasks more difficult.
While climate change will continue to compound the existing care crisis, efforts to address climate change could paradoxically do the same. Both mitigation and adaptation efforts that either change access to resources or necessitate changes in behavior stand to interact with the provision of care work and risk entrenching gender inequality. For example, agricultural practices that rely on composting or vermiculture to reduce the use of industrial fertilizers can, if poorly designed, place additional burdens on carers’ time.
Likewise, many climate initiatives involve time-intensive educational or awareness-raising programs that can further burden those with greater care responsibilities. Notably, even economic empowerment programs directed at women have ignored the social norms dictating responsibility for care work, thereby resulting in further demands on women’s time.
Finally, efforts that involve protecting the environment from human use as a means to combat climate change, such as climate programs that restrict people from forests, can end up depriving populations of economic opportunity. In such cases, women are often forced to add economically remunerative tasks to their existing care work.
Efforts at addressing climate change that ignore care dynamics are likely to suffer one of two fates. Where innovations require behavior changes or the uptake of new technologies, they will simply be ignored if they place undue burdens on people’s time. On the other hand, if such interventions are unavoidable, past evidence suggests that women have often ended up worse off than they were before the intervention.
The 5R Framework
To be sure, we cannot postpone or lower our ambitions in the global fight against climate change. Aggressive mitigation efforts are required among industrialized nations that bear the greatest responsibility for climate change and that have the greatest capacity to address it. Further, climate finance to support the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations needs to be stepped up substantially.
But these efforts need to be rendered sensitive to the way that care work is currently done in different societies. We must design climate initiatives that both address adaptation and mitigation needs, and tackle the systemic forces shaping the unequal distribution of care work. Unfortunately, achieving this dual aim is unlikely if we merely tweak climate initiatives under the guise of being “gender responsive.” The structural factors shaping the distribution of care work are highly context specific, rooted in distinct sets of gender norms and relations as well as a host of interacting structural factors—such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Adding to this complicated picture, we must also be careful about how the injustices surrounding care work are characterized. While it is certainly true that women’s disproportionate responsibility for care work drives structural gender inequalities, engaging in care work can be an important source of social meaning and status. This complicates the notion of simply seeking to “liberate” women from care responsibilities.
Climate initiatives must appreciate how care responsibilities shape livelihoods and individual well-being. This requirement demands that we center the voices and perspectives of carers in designing, implementing, and evaluating climate initiatives. To further ensure that we address their needs, we recommend the 5R framework that originates in work by social scientist Diane Elson and the United Nations Development Programme: 1) Recognize the importance of care work in society and the injustices associated with women’s disproportionate responsibility to carry it out; 2) reduce the overall care burden, such that women have more time to dedicate to other priorities; 3) redistribute responsibility for care work, either by shifting the norms that assign the intersectionally gendered responsibilities for care work (i.e., normalizing it as work that men and boys carry out on equal terms) or by collectivizing care work through, for example, government investment in care infrastructure, such as schools, health care, water, and sanitation; 4) afford representation to carers—through political organizations and facilitated participation—such that they can shape programs and policies affecting their lives; and 5) reward carers for the care work they undertake through direct remuneration (an approach with some controversy) or through the provision of basic entitlements.
In the context of climate change, the 5R framework suggests three areas for strategic prioritization. First, support investments in labor-saving technology and infrastructure that carers have identified as necessary for alleviating the twin crises of climate and care work—for example, energy and water infrastructure or labor-saving agricultural technologies.
Second, invest in long-term social infrastructure and support mechanisms, such as employment guarantees, pensions, cash and asset transfer programs, and micro-insurance. Among low-income populations in less industrialized nations, such mechanisms have tended to only be applied narrowly, and in times of acute crisis. Given the increasingly complex and interlinked array of risks that poor and vulnerable people face, narrow and limited approaches will be insufficient to build the resilience of the poorest and most marginal and alleviate the compounding challenges that carers face.
Third, pursue efforts that link climate initiatives with efforts to share care work more equally at the household level by, for example, working to shift gender norms (such that all tasks are seen as equally acceptable for both men and women), as part of climate programming.
Some readers may be surprised that the mainstream climate agenda is so insensitive to issues relating to care work and inequality. It is admittedly challenging to combine climate mitigation and adaptation efforts with careful attention to care dynamics. But failure to do so could mean that gender-responsive climate change efforts intensify rather than redress gender inequality, causing ever more harm to women and girls around the world. And just as important, such failure could ultimately undermine climate change efforts themselves.
Read more stories by James Morrissey, Sherilyn MacGregor & Seema Arora-Jonsson.