Advocacy in Action
Mar 24, 2026
On March 16 at CSW70, WEDO joined partners for the side event: Care and Climate: How Care Systems Shape Access to Justice in a Just Transition.
Care Is Climate Infrastructure in the Just Transition
On March 16 at CSW70, WEDO joined partners for the side event: Care and Climate: How Care Systems Shape Access to Justice in a Just Transition.
The conversation centered on a truth that feminist movements have long held: Care systems are climate infrastructure. Despite this prominent role in sustaining households, communities, and ecosystems, care work remains largely absent from climate and just transition policies.
This disconnect has real consequences as the climate crisis accelerates. Climate change intensifies unpaid care burdens. It disrupts livelihoods and deepens inequalities, especially for women and marginalized communities in the Global South. When care systems collapse under climate stress, those most affected face barriers to exercising rights, accessing remedies, and participating in decision-making. Recognizing care as climate infrastructure and care workers as central to a just transition is essential for advancing gender equality and building inclusive, resilient societies.
The panel brought together government representatives, grassroots feminist organizations, and researchers from across the Global South to share evidence and lived experiences from the Climate and Care Fund, and to advance recommendations for embedding care into climate finance, adaptation policy, and just transition frameworks ahead of COP31.
Throughout the event, each speaker demonstrated the impact of climate on care work. The seven hours women spend daily on unpaid care rise to 13 or more during climate disasters, creating time poverty that prevents women from participating in governance, accessing services, and exercising their rights, as H.E. Ermelita Valdeavilla of the Philippine Commission on Women shared.
Unpaid care work increases by 40% during climate stress events like drought, reducing women’s time for education, income generation, and safety, as Malkia John of Sauti Salama shared. At the same time, the resulting household tensions and service disruptions increase gender-based violence.
Care gaps are justice gaps. This is a historical imposition from a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist system that demands women sustain everything while remaining invisible. Climate disasters collapse the social safety nets women are expected to hold up, leaving women as the emergency care economy without recognition, funding, or protection.
Globally, climate finance frameworks and just transition strategies continue to overlook the care systems and labor that sustain life and build resilience.
Mara Dolan, Policy Coordinator at WEDO, highlighted the historic inclusion of care language in the COP30 Just Transition negotiations. The decision that mandates the creation of the Bélem Action Mechanism (BAM), which originated as a civil society-driven proposal under the UNFCCC, also includes care work, informal labor sectors, gender-responsive approaches, and social protection systems as fundamental elements that must be integrated into just transition policies, plans, and strategies.
“[These are] doors that we can open wide for care movements to inform. … I see us standing at a really significant emerging opening. ”
— Mara Dolan, Policy Coordinator at WEDO
To produce real-world outcomes, we need context-specific, community-grounded knowledge. A rich ecosystem of partnerships, such as the Climate and Care Regional Hub supported by IDRC, the Climate and Care Initiative, and Fundación Avina, serves as the knowledge infrastructure that can resource the BAM’s implementation. With these partnerships, policymakers have ready access to case studies and best practices tailored to local realities.
“These climate and care hubs, and everyone working at this intersection of climate and care, are doing the work to ensure that when parties ask us for a book, we actually have a full library to share.”
— Mara Dolan, Policy Coordinator at WEDO
Over the coming year, WEDO will help release nearly a dozen new resources through these hubs. These materials will offer issue-, sector-, and region-specific learning to strengthen advocacy at every level.
A true just transition means we cannot move from a fossil-fuel-based economy built on the backs of women’s unpaid care work to a renewable energy economy with the same underlying inequalities. WEDO remains committed to working with allied movements and partners to achieve global climate governance that is accountable to frontline communities, embeds care at every level, and delivers on the promise of a gender-just transition for women, gender-diverse people, workers, and the communities who need it most.
This event was co-organized by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Fundación Avina, the Climate and Care Initiative, and the Global Alliance for Care, with WEDO. The event was co-sponsored by the governments of Mexico, the Philippines, Finland, and Canada.
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