Unpaid care, climate change and loss and damage in Bangladesh

When climate crises hit, they disrupt care infrastructure: public services like education and healthcare; and damage infrastructure for transport, water and sanitation.

Climate disasters also cause increased health needs and displacement, which affects family and community support systems. Combined, this results in increased unpaid care workloads. These effects fall hardest on low-income women, with an 18% increase in average unpaid care hours for women in the lowest economic quintiles.

Against the backdrop of worsening climate crises, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) made a commitment in 2022 to establish a Loss and Damage Fund to support “developing countries”, responding to the negative effects of climate change – including both sudden-onset events like floods, and slow-onset events including desertification and salinization (a type of irreversible damage to soil).

Where the action falls short

While this was a promising breakthrough, there remain key issues:

1. Countries in the Global North have not fulfilled their responsibility to contribute enough money to match the scale of climate crisis.
2. As with many climate responses, there has not been enough exploration of the ways people are affected differently based on their gender (and other characteristics including class, race, ethnicity, disability).

Building on a 2023 publication on Gendered Dimensions of Loss and Damage in Asia, we are excited to launch a paper that shines a light on the issue of unpaid care, a key gendered impact of climate disaster, in the context of loss and damage.

A key finding of the paper is that care is not meaningfully considered in current loss and damage assessments. When care is not formally recognised, its potential to deepen gendered inequalities is left out of climate responses.

Loss and damage is categorized into economic and non-economic categories, and there’s an intuitive tendency to group care in as a non-economic impact – given its effects on physical and mental health. But care’s economic effects are equally important:

1. Care work supports the entire market economy: if people are not fed, and children are not cared for, the economy cannot function.
2. When women’s unpaid care workloads increase, it reduces their ability to access their right to decent work ("productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity"), with negative impacts on their livelihoods.

For that reason, we think it’s vital for care to be addressed explicitly in both economic and non-economic loss and damage categories.

National policy

The report also reviews national policy around climate responses and highlights several gaps at the national level:

• Fragmentation across sectors: Gender affairs, climate adaptation, social protection, and public services like healthcare and education, are managed by separate ministries with limited coordination between them.
• Data deficiency: “Time-Use Surveys” look at how people spend their time and are an important tool for measuring unpaid care work, but the most recent data available is from 2021. There are no sex-disaggregated data sets focussed on the result of climate disasters, which means there’s limited evidence of how and how much unpaid care workloads increase with climate crises.
• Lack of dedicated budget: Care infrastructure and services are not explicitly included in climate adaptation budgets.

Global policy

At the same time, there are shortcomings at a global level:

• Standardised assessments miss gendered impact: Approaches typically ignore time-use losses, caregiving stress, or mental and physical tolls on women in climate-vulnerable settings.
• Language shortfalls: Policies talk about “coping capacity” in neutral terms, without recognising that in practice, women’s unpaid labour is providing the “shock absorption” that holds systems together in crisis.

Taken together, the policies that exist in Bangladesh and around the world aren’t designed to consider care in terms of climate disaster, making them ill-equipped to respond effectively.

To address these gaps, the report proposes eight recommendations:

1. Recognise the gendered impacts of unpaid care as a critical component of loss and damage.
2. Improve data collection and monitoring.
3. Invest in care infrastructure and basic services to reduce unpaid care.
4. Reward care work through social protection and climate finance.
5. Make sure women are represented in leadership and decision-making around climate responses.
6. Work with communities to shift towards greater gender equality around care distribution.
7. Promote collaboration between countries at a regional level.
8. Fill the fund: high-emitting countries must contribute enough finance for the loss and damage fund to work effectively.

As the climate crisis continues to get worse, we need urgent action to make sure it doesn’t make existing inequalities worse. To do that, the gendered impacts of climate disasters need to be taken into account, and that means putting care at the centre of climate responses.