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Environmental Shocks, Economic Shifts: A Feminist Agenda for Macroeconomic Resilience

  • Writer: Jennifer Obado Joel
    Jennifer Obado Joel
  • 5 days ago
  • 5 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Climate change is no longer tomorrow’s headline; it is today’s lived reality. From lethal heat waves in South Asia to once-in-a-century floods that now arrive every few years, environmental shocks are accelerating in frequency and ferocity. The economic bill is staggering: disasters wiped out roughly USD 202 billion in assets and income in 2020 alone, with low-income countries bearing the heaviest burden. Yet the monetary tally tells only part of the story. Because women shoulder most unpaid care work, dominate informal agricultural labour, and have less access to financial safety nets, climate-related losses land hardest on them. A feminist lens, therefore, is not an optional add-on; it is the analytical clarity we need to design macroeconomic systems that can withstand a climate-changed world.


How Environmental Shocks Disrupt the Macroeconomy and Women’s Lives


Cyclones that flatten coastal roads also flatten municipal tax bases. Droughts that reduce crop yields also increase food prices, affecting household budgets and national inflation targets simultaneously. The Swiss Re tally already represents lost factories, ruined harvests, and broken supply chains, but it masks a parallel crisis of unpaid labour as women spend extra hours fetching scarcer water, caring for the sick, or rebuilding homes. These invisible costs feed a vicious macroeconomic loop: lower female labour-force participation depresses GDP growth, while reduced growth curtails public revenue for adaptation.


Global modelling by UNDP warns that compound crises, pandemics, conflict, and climate have pushed the Human Development Index into consecutive declines for the first time in 32 years. Feminist economists translate that macro metric into everyday trade-offs: girls pulled out of school to help with farm or care work, women selling assets at distress prices after a flood, or entrepreneurs losing credit lines because collateral was washed away. Without intervention, climate change will hard-code these gender gaps into future national accounts.


Defining Feminist Macroeconomic Resilience


Standard definitions of macroeconomic resilience focus on an economy’s capacity to absorb and bounce back from shocks while sustaining growth. A feminist definition widens the aperture: whose growth, whose bounce-back, and whose risks are we counting? Resilience must be judged by how quickly women in rural cooperatives regain incomes, how safely pregnant people evacuate in a cyclone, and how equitably public budgets support low-carbon jobs for all.


Below are six feminist policy pillars—adapted from mainstream macro playbooks but rewired around equity, care, and voice.


1. Climate- and Gender-Informed Fiscal Policy

Green budgeting already helps governments align spending with environmental goals, but a feminist upgrade adds gender tagging to both expenditures and revenues. That means tracking how climate-resilient roads reduce unpaid care hours, or how carbon taxes are recycled into childcare vouchers and women-led renewable-energy cooperatives. Counter-cyclical buffers should earmark a share for rapid cash transfers to female-headed households after disasters; otherwise, liquidity ceilings in ministries will translate into food insecurity in kitchens.


2. Shock-Responsive and Care-Responsive Social Protection


Every hurricane is also a care crisis. Adaptive social-protection systems must therefore scale cash-plus-care packages, mobile-money stipends alongside mobile crèches, for example. Index-based insurance that pays out when rainfall thresholds are breached can safeguard women farmers’ creditworthiness and prevent distress borrowing. Because gender norms often block asset ownership, eligibility rules should recognise informal tenure and community savings groups as proof of loss.


3. Feminist Financial-System Preparedness


Central banks and regulators now run climate stress tests; feminist macro-prudence asks a follow-up: do credit shortfalls fall disproportionately on women? The Network for Greening the Financial System guides supervisors on climate risk. Incorporating sex-disaggregated data into those tests would reveal whether small women-led enterprises face higher default probabilities after floods, and whether guarantee schemes or green bonds can close the gap. Development banks could underwrite “gender-resilient catastrophe bonds” that pay a premium if evacuation centres meet minimum standards for women’s safety and reproductive health.


4. Diversification, Structural Transformation, and the Care Economy


Moving economies out of fossil-fuel dependence and climate-sensitive commodities is table stakes for resilience, but how we diversify matters. Investments in wind farms and climate-smart agriculture generate jobs, yet care infrastructure, child- and elder-care facilities, paid leave, and public healthcare also build human capital and free women’s time for education and entrepreneurship. Oxfam estimates that closing global care gaps would add trillions to GDP while lowering inequality. A “just green transition” must therefore twin renewable-energy deployment with a care-economy stimulus package.


5. Transparent Data and Dashboards


Macroeconomic dashboards still treat gender as a social sidebar. The IMF’s Climate Change Indicators show emission trends and fiscal exposure; adding sex-disaggregated wage, employment, and care indicators would convert them into real-time equity compasses. World Bank Country Climate and Development Reports now integrate mitigation, adaptation, and development. Next-generation CCDRs should measure how each policy scenario affects women’s unpaid labour and earnings.


6. Regional and Global Solidarity, Powered by Feminist Finance


No state can climate-proof its economy alone, but the current global financial architecture is gender-blind. Loss-and-Damage funds negotiated at COP 27 need governance seats for women from the most affected communities, not just technocrats. Likewise, debt-for-climate swaps should include conditionalities that protect social spending on health and education services where women are both primary providers and primary users. Failure to invest in gender equality already costs the world an estimated USD 10 trillion annually; feminist resilience is therefore a macro-fiscal bargain, not a boutique concern.

Resilience as Redistribution and Recognition


Building macroeconomic resilience in a climate-changed world is ultimately a question of power: who decides national budgets, who benefits from fiscal buffers, and whose labour is recognised in GDP? Environmental shocks expose the fault lines of patriarchal economies; a feminist response closes them. By greening budgets and valuing care, by integrating climate risk and gender metrics in banks, and by diversifying energy mixes and livelihoods, we can craft economies that survive climate turbulence without sacrificing equity. Resilience, in short, is feminist or it is fragile.






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