Abstract
Climate adaptation planning has largely overlooked care systems, despite these systems’ central role in determining whether households and communities can withstand climate shocks. Care systems function as critical resilience infrastructure: They protect vulnerable populations, enable workforce participation, and maintain essential services during crises. When care systems are weak, climate shocks cascade into broader social and economic failures. When they are strong, they act as shock absorbers that stabilize communities. Integrating care into adaptation planning is therefore not a social add-on, but a core strategy for reducing vulnerability and ensuring system-wide resilience.
This paper argues that investing in a comprehensive care services infrastructure is foundational to climate adaptation and identifies the needs and actions necessary for adapting the care services sectors to climate change. Building resilience of a care services infrastructure involves adapting both services and physical infrastructure. For services, the key elements of the needs and actions identified include integration of workforce requirements to respond to rising care needs under substantially more constrained conditions during climate disruptions and support for adaptation planning, preparedness, training, and administration. The physical environments in which care is provided—both institutional care facilities and home-based settings—also need to be adapted to be capable of withstanding and responding to climate-related hazards. This includes both retrofitting existing buildings and developing new infrastructure using climate-resilient, inclusive, and sustainable design principles, such as nature-based solutions. The heart of the paper is an empirical methodology for estimating the costs of investing in a climate-resilient care services infrastructure, focusing on early childhood education and care and long-term care services. The methodology is then applied to data from Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. The results reveal that the magnitude of required investments in a climate-resilient care services infrastructure is substantial, with the largest share of spending directed toward new employment. However, these estimates need to be considered alongside the costs of inaction and the broader economic returns associated with investments in care services sectors.
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
The authors are grateful to Kendall Trelegan, Laura Martinez Rodriguez, and Ibrahim Sapaloglu for their excellent research assistance, and Manann Donoghoe, Homi Kharas, Sweta Shah, Ito Peng, Mike Rogan, Mattias Söderberg, Eleonore Souberyan, and Ahmet Atil Asici for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. We also thank participants for their valuable feedback in three virtual consultations on the Bangladesh context, methodology, and results, organized by the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, as well as participants in the UNU-WIDER conference on Green Industrialization and Inclusive Growth in a Fractured World Order in New Delhi.
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