Climate finance must prioritise mothers and care

Our submission frames climate change not merely as an environmental crisis, but as a profound human rights emergency that disproportionately impacts women, particularly during pregnancy and motherhood.

Climate finance ignores unpaid care work

Extreme heat, pollution, food insecurity, and displacement increase risks of maternal mortality, preterm birth, and mental health disorders like depression and anxiety, yet these issues remain largely absent from current climate financing mechanisms.

Mothers and unpaid caregivers constitute the “invisible frontline” of climate response, securing water, food, and care for vulnerable family members. However, global climate finance architecture systematically ignores unpaid care work, focusing instead on mitigation, infrastructure, and technology. This exclusion undermines fundamental rights to life, health, equality, and dignity. Only 0.5% of multilateral climate finance targets human health, despite 90% of countries including health priorities in their Nationally Determined Contributions.

Promising models of care-centred climate finance exist, such as the Climate & Care Initiative, which provides small grants (up to US$ 50,000) to women-led grassroots organisations, and feminist funds like Mama Cash that support Indigenous women and community organisers. These examples demonstrate that locally-led, grant-based funding can effectively address the intersection of climate adaptation and care responsibilities.

We identifies four structural barriers in current climate finance: the invisibility of care work in financing frameworks, structural exclusion of women-led organisations through complex accreditation requirements, over-reliance on debt-based financing that crowds out public health spending, and the absence of metrics tracking care-related impacts.

MMM Recommendations for care-centred climate financing

To address these gaps, MMM proposes six principles for a care-centred climate finance system: recognising care as essential infrastructure, advancing gender equality and care justice, enabling direct access for grassroots organisations, prioritising non-debt financing, embedding human rights accountability, and implementing meaningful monitoring with disaggregated data.

Our submission concludes with eight key recommendations for States and climate finance actors, including integrating care into global climate finance priorities, creating small-grant funding windows (USD 10,000–100,000) for caregiver-led initiatives, embedding maternal and mental health in National Adaptation Plans, limiting loans for health and care sectors, and ensuring meaningful participation of mothers in decision-making.

Investing in mothers is not charity but effective climate adaptation and human rights protection. We urge the UN and Member States to move beyond “green” finance to place care, health, and human dignity at the centre of climate finance architecture.

Read MMM’s full submission to the call for input