It’s Time for Climate Activists to Care about Care

A guest blog for International Womens Day by Vanessa Conroy from Feminist Communities for Climate Justice

After exiting 2023, a year of record-breaking climate statistics and entering 2024, a year where care is at the centre of a potential Constitutional amendment, this International Women’s Day is an unmissable opportunity to bring care into the climate space.

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Climate Action Plan 2024 was released at the end of 2023, which was a record-breaking year in climate change for all of the wrong reasons. It is inevitable that the economy and day-to-day life in Ireland need to become low carbon, and Climate Action Plan 2024 highlights the need for more green jobs, alongside upskilling and training in green work. The discourse on green jobs tends to revolve around retrofitting, green energy generation, solar panel installation and making agriculture less carbon emitting. These are all new jobs, or existing jobs made ‘greener’.

But there is work in Ireland that has always been low-carbon work, yet fails to be included in the green jobs discussion – care work.

Caring work, both inside and outside of the home, paid and unpaid, is essential to the survival of the human species and our wellbeing. It is also by nature low carbon work, requiring little to no extraction of natural resources to carry out compared to ‘typical’ green jobs, and is twenty-six times greener than jobs in manufacturing.

Despite this, care work continues to be taken for granted in society – underacknowledged in the home, underpaid in the formal sector, unrecognised as green work. Care and our environment are treated similarly by our economic system, too, seen as infinite and freely available to uphold this system when this is far from the reality.

Care work is largely the responsibility of women the world over, and women still do twice as much caring work as men in Ireland. This has implications for climate policy, and the impacts of the climate crisis for women. Caring for others impacts the way women use their cars, consume energy and spend money – it is key to the gendered experience of climate change globally.

Yet Irish climate policy pays no attention to these links, all of which are well researched. The word ‘care’ only appears in the four hundred plus page Climate Action Plan 2024 twice – neither appearance relates to the key role care work plays in society now and could play in a climate-neutral one.

Not paying attention to how care and climate policy interact is an oversight for work that is essential to society. For example, research conducted by Transport Infrastructure Ireland shows that caring duties are the reason that the majority of Irish women consider a car a ‘necessity’. Transporting a pram or a wheelchair is far easier in a car than it is by existing modes of public transport, which has implications for who uses and benefits from the reduced fares and new routes – especially if those prams and wheelchairs are competing for one space on a bus.

‘Care-less’ climate policy inevitably impacts women negatively as the primary givers of care in Irish society – but it ultimately impacts all carers negatively.

Recognising care work as green work means a labour which is so essential, but often made invisible, becomes a part of the climate conversation. It necessitates talking about care work and affording it the same value, attention and funding as is being given to jobs in retrofitting, renewable energy generation and sustainable transport, among others. Additionally, it brings more women into an economic transition plan which currently consists of male-dominated job sectors.

Green jobs, by many definitions, involve preserving and protecting the environment – an environment that humanity is very much part of. If we are willing to expand our thinking around care, it is already a key part of climate policy in the form of care for non-human species. Redefining care in this way allows us to question and ultimately decry the human/nature binary which has enabled so much destruction of our planet in the name of profit and ‘progress’. We all need care, and to care for others – human and non-human.

Climate policy and climate movements which fail to take notice of care work, ultimately, will create net-zero futures where this essential work remains undervalued and taken for granted, locking in continued gender inequality. This International Women’s Day, it is high time to make care a central part of the climate conversation.

For futher reading see:

• Feminist Communities for Climate Justice
• Care Section of the Baseline Research