Climate Resilience Starts With Care

Climate shocks necessitate adaptation strategies that are currently absent from national planning and funding estimates, particularly concerning care services. The UN Environment Programme projects a need of $310–365 billion per year for developing countries through 2035, creating a funding gap of $280 billion. A critical infrastructure gap exists in climate-adapted care services, which are necessary to help families prepare for, cope with, and recover from climate hazards. The absence of these services contributes to excess mortality during heat waves, as demonstrated by provisional estimates of 35,000 excess deaths across Europe. When care systems fail during disasters like floods or wildfires, formal care becomes vital for vulnerable populations, preventing a cascade into further health and economic crises.
National adaptation plans often overlook this infrastructure because sector-by-sector approaches allocate insufficient funds to long-term care and early childhood care, which are largely informal in low- and middle-income countries. This omission results in family caregivers, predominantly women, absorbing the burden during emergencies, leading to burnout and economic losses. Investment in climate-resilient care can generate employment through building and retrofitting, establish an evidence base for risk assessment, and provide long-term financial returns through reduced future social protection costs.

* The UN Environment Programme estimates developing countries will need $310–365 billion per year through 2035.
* The current funding gap for adaptation is estimated at $280 billion.
* Provisional estimates suggest at least 35,000 excess deaths occurred across Europe during the summer heat waves.
* National climate-adaptation plans rarely account for care system breakdowns during climate events.
* Floods and wildfires displace families and separate caregivers from dependents.
* The absence of climate-adapted infrastructure contributed to excess mortality in Europe.
* Family caregivers face injury and burnout during emergencies, sometimes leaving paid work.
* Global adaptation finance allocates nearly 40% to agriculture, forestry, fishing, water supply, and sanitation; health receives an estimated 4–6%; education around 2%.
* Long-term care and early-childhood care and education are essentially absent in many low- and middle-income countries.
* Building climate-resilient care infrastructure in Bangladesh would require an investment equivalent to roughly 3–5% of GDP.
* Early-childhood care and education and long-term care could directly employ 3.6–7 million people in Bangladesh.

The core tension revealed here is the structural misalignment between climate risk assessment and existing adaptation financing priorities, specifically regarding social infrastructure. The argument shifts the focus from conventional sectors (like agriculture or health) to care systems as a necessary foundation for true resilience. This move exposes a systemic failure in how risks are categorized; by excluding care services, planning underestimates the actual human cost of climate events, allowing cascading failures in health and economics to occur.
The proposal to treat care infrastructure as an adaptation investment links immediate disaster response with long-term economic stability through job creation and fiscal efficiency. The calculation that building care infrastructure could employ millions suggests a path where climate finance can simultaneously address humanitarian needs and labor market demands, creating self-sustaining investments rather than purely reactive aid. This perspective forces a re-evaluation of what constitutes 'adaptation'—it must incorporate the ecosystem supporting human life, not just physical assets or conventional economic sectors. The emphasis on unpaid care work and female caregivers highlights an unacknowledged societal cost that is only realized when formal support systems fail during stress events.
The pattern suggests that official planning inherently favors measurable, tangible assets, leaving complex, relational infrastructure—like social care—as externalities to be managed by informal networks under duress. The narrative resists a purely technocratic view of climate finance, demanding instead an integration where resilience is measured not just by physical infrastructure but by the capacity of communities to sustain their most vulnerable members through disruption. What assumptions about who pays for adaptation and who bears the risk are being implicitly challenged?