Climate resilience starts with care

Caren Grown & Kendall Trelegan

It is getting harder by the day to justify the slow pace of adaptation to climate change. Last year was one of the hottest on record, with economies and communities around the world disrupted by extreme heat, heavy rainfall, and tropical cyclones. As November’s COP31 in Turkey approaches, governments must move beyond climate commitments and focus on implementation. Financing for adaptation activities remains nowhere near what is needed. The UNEP estimates that developing countries will need $310–365 billion per year through 2035, putting the current funding gap at $280 billion.

Getting the money to where it can do the most good may be an even bigger challenge, as institutions struggle to identify adaptation investments that are ready to implement and whose risks can be properly assessed and priced. In a new working paper, we argue that estimates of funding needs and proposed investment pipelines overlook a critical piece of infrastructure: an ecosystem of climate-adapted care services that helps families prepare for, cope with, and recover from climate-induced hazards. Properly designed, these services can bolster household and community resilience. Provisional estimates suggest that at least 35,000 excess deaths occurred across Europe during this summer’s severe back-to-back heat waves.

Despite their well-developed welfare systems, the absence of climate-adapted physical infrastructure and coordinated services contributed to this excess mortality. Yet national climate-adaptation plans rarely account for what happens when care breaks down. Floods and wildfires displace families and separate caregivers from the people who depend on them. When household-based care is no longer possible, formal care can become a lifeline for older people and people with disabilities who cannot evacuate or manage on their own. As matters stand, family caregivers are left to shoulder the burden, facing injury and burnout during prolonged emergencies. Some, most of them women, are forced to leave paid work just when their families can least afford to lose income. When care systems fail, a climate shock can quickly become both a health and economic crisis. Leaving care out of national adaptation plans thus means underestimating what climate resilience actually requires.

Admittedly, anticipating those needs is difficult, as there is no standard definition of what qualifies as adaptation, and national estimates are often based on individual projects, most of them in conventional sectors. That sector-by-sector approach allows care to fall through the cracks. Agriculture, forestry, fishing, water supply, and sanitation account for nearly 40% of global adaptation finance, while health receives an estimated 4–6% and education around 2%. Despite being too low, the $310–365 billion figure is already baked into national plans and multilateral development bank targets. But as climate shocks intensify, people will need more care, not less. And when formal services fall short, unpaid caregivers—overwhelmingly women and girls—will end up filling the gap. Our paper proposes a way to begin correcting that omission. For example, we estimate that building climate-resilient care infrastructure in Bangla desh would require an investment equivalent to roughly 3–5% of GDP, similar to what is needed for health and education.

This is a substantial investment, but only a fraction of the estimated value of unpaid care work. Building that care infrastructure would require millions of workers. We estimate that early-childhood care and education and long-term care could directly employ 3.6–7 million people in Bangladesh. More jobs would come from providing food and other supplies, as well as from building or retrofitting childcare facilities and homes for people receiving long-term care. As adaptation financing tightens, every dollar has to work harder. That makes it all the more important to invest in care systems that help communities withstand climate shocks while easing pressure on public budgets.

Caren Grown is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings Institution. Kendall Trelegan is a research analyst at the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings Institution.