The Environment-Care Nexus: How Environmental Degradation Amplifies Gender Inequalities in Unpaid Work

May 15, 2025 | Maryruth Belsey Priebe

According to an insightful new study, the meaningful inclusion of women in planning for both climate adaptation and mitigation strategies is crucial to building future resilience. Societies where women lack access to decision-making, finance, or education find it difficult to implement essential climate solutions. This finding takes on particular urgency as environmental degradation and climate change are creating profound shifts in both human and national security. The connection between environmental breakdown and the added unpaid care responsibilities for women is frequently overlooked and threatens societal resilience to environmental challenges. The lack of opportunities for women caused by unpaid work responsibilities diminishes societies' capacity to tackle environmental emergencies.

The feedback loops between environmental degradation and care responsibilities are expected to intensify in the coming decades. Slow- and rapid-onset climate-induced disasters often escalate demands on women's unpaid labor as crucial variables of adjustment to shocks - in other words, women's unpaid labor flexibly expands during crises to absorb shocks and maintain household welfare when formal support systems fail. This increased burden not only impacts women's wellbeing but also their ability to participate in community resilience efforts. When women's physical and mental resources are depleted due to intensified unpaid care and domestic work responsibilities, their capacity to contribute to climate adaptation and disaster preparedness is significantly diminished, creating a cyclical pattern of increasing vulnerability.

Through social reproduction theory, we can better comprehend how gender roles and care work activities influence environmental resilience. This framework explains how societies reproduce themselves through three interconnected processes: biological reproduction and family maintenance (such as childcare and elder care); unpaid production of goods and services in the home (such as cooking, cleaning, and resource gathering); and reproduction of cultural ideology that maintains these arrangements. Environmental degradation affects all three processes by intensifying childcare challenges, increasing climate-related illnesses, and intensifying the time and work required to gather resources while reinforcing cultural expectations that demand women meet these additional responsibilities through their unpaid labor. According to feminist academics, political and economic systems that shape interactions between humans and with natural resources are social processes in which gender considerations are frequently hidden or disregarded. The invisibility of gender roles creates unequal power dynamics that force women to bear the brunt of unpaid care work.

This article first examines how environmental degradation directly intensifies women's unpaid care burdens and creates indirect barriers to their participation in climate resilience efforts. The remainder of the piece explores transformative approaches that address the intersection of environmental degradation and women's unpaid care burdens. By examining both direct impacts and indirect barriers, we can identify solutions that not only reduce women's disproportionate care responsibilities but also support gender equity and enhance environmental resilience through women’s meaningful inclusion.

Direct Environmental Impacts on Care Work

Environmental degradation significantly increases women's care burdens through multiple pathways. The everyday tasks of water collection and management alongside cooking, laundry, cleaning, and caring for both children and sick relatives fall mainly to women and girls. What follows is a discussion of four domains in which climate change is already intensifying these burdens: disaster response, water management, food (and energy) security, and health care.

During climate disasters, women experience particularly harsh impacts. Environmental crises that disrupt public services require women to provide unpaid labor by taking on additional healthcare provision tasks along with childcare and food production duties. Research from India shows that climate breakdown leads to more labour intensive fruit and vegetable production, increased family illness (requiring more care for sick family members), extended time to obtain fuel and drinking water, and more frequent household repairs and maintenance performed by women. As an Ecuadorian study has found, the extra responsibilities women face can lead to burnout as women experience exhaustion from their multiple duties.

Water scarcity and contamination present special challenges outside disasters. The increasing frequency of droughts and water source contamination driven by climate change often compels women to travel greater distances for water collection and spend more time on this task, and can increase the time required to address the health threats that contaminated water poses to their families. Crucially, women who collect water frequently face more sexual harassment and gender-based violence as their journeys become longer and to more remote locations. Very similar patterns are seen with fuel collection and energy security.

Similarly, food security presents another critical challenge. Women produce around 40% of global food through their work in kitchen gardens and through household animal husbandry, yet face systematic denial of access to land ownership, farm resources, and inputs required for agricultural production. The disruption of traditional growing seasons by climate change causes more crop failures which forces women to dedicate extra time to food production and preparation while maintaining household food security. As food production decreases and food prices fluctuate, many women tend to prioritize their family's nutritional needs by eating less themselves.

Climate-related problems can lead to substantial health issues that generate more caregiving duties for women. As climate change causes more waterborne diseases and heat-related illnesses, more time is required to care for sick people while women’s own disease risks grow and available time for other tasks decreases. What’s more, women face more anxiety and feelings of desperation and helplessness than men due to managing both environmental stressors and care responsibilities.

These intersecting challenges create a compounding burden: women's responsibilities for household water management and food preparation mean they must devise coping strategies for resource scarcity while maintaining family care. This often results in increased workloads and physical strain, with accompanying higher rates of neck pain, spinal injuries, and other health impacts from carrying heavy loads of water and fuel.

Indirect Barriers to Environmental Resilience

As care responsibilities grow, they tend to place substantial physical and mental demands on women, which act as major obstacles to building environmental resilience. As climate change intensifies, these barriers become more pronounced. Time poverty, depletion through social reproduction, limited resource control, and restricted access to financial services are all critical barriers to women engaging in activities that would otherwise boost their resilience.

Because women spend disproportionate time on unpaid care responsibilities like collecting water, preparing food, and caring for family members, they often experience what is referred to as time poverty: a lack of sufficient time for rest and leisure after accounting for hours spent on paid and unpaid work activities. Women's disproportionate responsibilities for unpaid care work – from collecting water to caring for sick family members – means they have fewer hours available for education, income-generating activities, and community decision-making processes that could improve their adaptive capacity. Moreover, gendered household resource management responsibilities frequently limit women's participation in environmental governance and adaptation planning.

Feminist scholars identify a critical obstacle known as "depletion through social reproduction" (DSR). This occurs when the endless cycle of unpaid care work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care – depletes women's bodies. This reality is further compounded when women receive fewer resource inputs (like food, rest, and healthcare) compared to their labor outputs. In this way, women provide an invisible economic subsidy through their unpaid bodily labor. The depletion of women's physical resources worsens during climate crises as they need to spend additional energy on basic care tasks such as fetching water from distant places and supporting family members who become ill from climate-related diseases, tasks which are made more intense by damaged infrastructure like water systems and roadways. Such additional burdens can contribute to physical and mental health harm which impairs their ability to respond to future environmental changes.

Further compounding these challenges: Women also struggle with limited control over land and water rights, while being shut out of technology, banking services, and crucial information networks. Women are frequently excluded from local resource management committees and regularly have no legal rights to control resources and land. Women are often left out of resource management because their unpaid care responsibilities consume their time, preventing them from participating in decision-making forums. Their non-paid status may also deny them the formal recognition required to enter circles of power. Their relegation to informal, unpaid care work means they lack the time, status, and resources to participate in formal environmental planning or to access adaptation resources.

When it comes to climate resilience, women frequently encounter obstacles to obtaining climate risk insurance and other barriers to accessing essential financial tools that could enhance their resilience. Financial institutions that ignore gender differences may fail to meet women's specific financial needs due to discrimination based on women’s unpredictable income patterns (unpaid duties often require them to leave paid work, resulting in earnings that do not comply with traditional banking criteria). This mismatch affects their risk profiles, protection needs, and abilities to maintain steady cash flows.

Transformative Solutions

Solving for both the direct and indirect burdens unpaid care work puts on women demands bold approaches that value women's invisible labour while strengthening communities against environmental threats. Beyond adapting existing systems, fundamental changes to care responsibility norms and distribution mechanisms are needed. Environmental planning that responds to gender issues needs to integrate the particular requirements and limitations women face, and should include care infrastructure investments, women’s meaningful participation, and structural transformation.

To start, care-supporting infrastructure investments such as gender-responsive water systems, healthcare facilities, and alternative transportation networks can reduce unpaid care work while also improving environmental security. These types of investments in infrastructure have the potential to make care tasks less time-consuming and less physically draining for women – for instance, one study has found that water system improvements in Tanzania could save women 1,128 million work hours per year.

Women's meaningful contribution to social and environmental policy decision-making is also essential. Not only is the inclusion of women a moral imperative, but research shows that when women hold community leadership positions, outcomes improve in part because of the additional insights women add to such planning. That said, it is necessary to avoid burdening women with additional obligations, such as participating in community resilience committees or disaster risk reduction planning councils, without finding ways to compensate for the additional time requirements. Adding to women's existing unpaid care responsibilities without also working to address foundational inequalities simply creates new burdens rather than transformative solutions.

A powerful example of compensating women for their time on climate committees comes from the Women's Empowerment for Resilience and Adaptation Against Climate Change (WERACC) initiative in Uganda. This program established women-led cooperatives where members contribute weekly savings that grow into a fund used for climate-resilient investments. The initiative specifically compensates women for their time in climate governance through a combination of approaches:

1. Participants receive direct financial stipends for attending climate adaptation planning meetings
2. The program schedules meetings during school hours to accommodate childcare needs
3. It provides on-site childcare during longer sessions
4. Women receive payment for their community education work when they share climate adaptation knowledge with others

Finally, transformative solutions must also pay attention to the needs of  specific vulnerable populations. Care must be taken when addressing environmental degradation in conflict zones as the two crises will inevitably lead to increased care responsibilities for women. Similarly, indigenous communities and those facing forced migration require specific consideration regarding how environmental changes interact with traditional care practices and social structures.

Breaking the Cycle: Transforming Care and Environmental Action

Environmental degradation and unpaid care / domestic work interact in complex ways and contribute to cycles that widen gender disparities and undermine societal resilience. Women experience growing time scarcity and physical exhaustion for women, a reality that will no doubt intensify as climate change makes unpaid care tasks more demanding. To fix this problem, we need to tackle climate issues and women's workloads together, which means reshaping who holds power and how decisions get made. 

One such example comes from a joint IDRC-CARE Ghana project. Project organizers discovered that their efforts to increase women smallholders' access to livestock vaccines were hampered because they failed to account for women's unpaid care responsibilities. Women couldn't attend training sessions because they were busy with domestic labor and farming tasks that men weren't expected to perform. The organization responded by redesigning their approach—adjusting training schedules, facilitating community discussions about gender norms, and formally recognizing women's previously invisible work in livestock raising. This intervention successfully shifted household power dynamics, allowing women to claim ownership over their livestock, make vaccination and selling decisions, and control the resulting income. The project demonstrated that addressing women's unpaid care work creates more climate-resilient food systems and enables communities to better withstand environmental shocks. Rather than treating gender equality as separate from climate resilience, this project showed how they are fundamentally interconnected. Indeed, only by recognizing and redistributing care responsibilities can we build truly sustainable and equitable environmental solutions.