"While every family is different, mothers are disproportionately the default parent, meaning climate disruptions can add to the mental load, logistical challenges, and economic pressures many women already face," Laura Schifter, a Senior Fellow at the D.C.-based Aspen Institute, told CG.
Driven by record-breaking heat waves and other extreme weather, school and summer camp closures across both Western and Eastern hemispheres have the potential to disproportionately affect mothers struggling to fill unexpected gaps in already insufficient child care arrangements.
"Climate change can't just be seen as an environmental issue for the future — it’s an issue reshaping childhood and family life today," Laura Schifter, a Senior Fellow at the D.C.-based Aspen Institute, told CG.
As families in Connecticut prepared to face an already hectic patchwork of costly activities and babysitting schedules intended to help working parents survive a summer without their kids in school, many saw some of their last few days of the academic year abbreviated by extreme heat. With high temperatures and humidity causing parts of the state to feel close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (around 38 degrees Celsius), at least eight school districts experienced early dismissals.
It could be enough to make any New England parent imagine they've been thrown back in time a few months to the frenzy of delays, dismissals, and full-blown snow days of winter, when moms often pick up the slack, even when it means doubling up or rearranging workloads.
A need to cover child care during COVID-19 school closures was identified as a driver behind higher rates of employment loss among women. And, according to a 2023 policy brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, mothers of young school-age children already see drops in employment during the summer months.
"While every family is different, mothers are disproportionately the default parent, meaning climate disruptions can add to the mental load, logistical challenges, and economic pressures many women already face," Schifter said.
Now, as human-induced climate change is intensifying and increasing the frequency of extreme weather of all kinds, school and child care disruptions are hitting year-round and around the world.
In New Delhi, recent heat waves have seen temperatures soar past 109 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius), posing threats to livelihoods and life itself. According to IndiaSpend, extreme heat already directly threatens the income and safety of the vast majority of India's female wage-earners, who work in the informal sector, which includes agriculture and street food vending. School closures are now adding another burden by indirectly affecting their earnings and well-being.
"Heat stress is projected to reduce global working hours by 2.2% (80 million jobs) by 2030, disproportionately affecting sectors with high female employment," Venge Nyirongo, Deputy Chief of Economic Empowerment and Policy Advisor for Sustainable Development at U.N. Women, told CG. "Reduced child care options accelerate income loss and economic insecurity, especially for low-income and single-mother households."
The Guardian reported this week that heat- and pollution-related school closures in India running from "mid-May until the end of June" have resulted in many mothers stepping back from the workforce, families living on reduced incomes, and children missing out on learning and more.
Kameron Dawson, Legal Director of the Southern Office at U.S.-based nonprofit advocacy organization A Better Balance, pointed out that class cancellations can lead to not only financial strain but food insecurity for families, perhaps especially those reliant on meals available through school systems.
"Sudden school closures can force mothers to scramble for emergency child care, and when that is unavailable, they are forced to cut their hours, miss shifts, or try to balance work responsibilities at home while providing care — if that option is even available to them at all," Dawson told CG. "This workplace penalty can not only cause a financial strain for mothers, but also cause physical and mental stress, which may have lasting impacts on their health. More so, as mothers are forced to leave the workforce in droves, workforce participation rates for caregivers will continue to decrease, negatively impacting communities and employers."
The phenomenon may soon become more apparent in parts of Europe as well. In recent days, scorching temperatures in excess of 96 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) have canceled or abbreviated school across the U.K. and France, where, according to the New York Times, many schools lack sufficient air conditioning.
Risks to dependable child care, however, go beyond extreme heat and schooling.
In terms of climate shocks, blizzards, wildfires, hurricanes, landslides, floods, and more can close not only schools but also daycares, after-school activities, and summer camps.
Last July, 25 campers, two teenage camp counselors, and the director of the all-girls facility Camp Mystic in Central Texas were killed along with over 100 other people in the area when torrential rains caused the Guadalupe River to rapidly rise and flood. The devastating tragedy served as a painful example of why more effective early-warning systems, evacuation plans, and staff and student training must be studied, standardized, invested in, and enforced at schools and camps.
In a recent opinion piece for USA Today, the Aspen Institute's Schifter underscored the importance of upgrading camp facilities to withstand the climate crisis and keep campers safe. in the piece, she outlined the need for improved infrastructure, policy, practices, and awareness.
"We need to stop treating extreme weather as an occasional disruption and start planning for it as a new reality," Schifter told CG.
She argues for measures including reliable cooling spaces, wildfire smoke filters, updated evacuation routes, emergency training and drills, evidence-based thresholds for closures and cancellations, clear communication plans for families, and extreme weather education for kids.
"Schools and camps were designed for yesterday's climate, not the one children are growing up in today. If we want kids to continue learning, playing, and thriving, climate preparedness has to become part of a safe, healthy learning environment for kids."
While ensuring safe learning and working conditions for children and staff should be the main driver propelling these updates, it may also be the case that — together with shifting cultural norms toward a more gender-balanced division of care work — improving the climate resilience of schools and camp facilities can help to mitigate the billions reportedly being lost by women workers amid rising global temperatures.
Otherwise, as Farah Kabir of ActionAid Bangladesh wrote in a recent op-ed for The Daily Star, it appears the world expects "climate resilience [to be] subsidized by the unpaid care work of women and girls."
In a press release this week, U.N. Women called this unpaid work "the invisible foundation of every economy and society," noting that recognition of and investment in this area as a true labor sector has the potential to create close to 300 million paid jobs for by 2035 and "two to three times more jobs than investments in the construction sector."
Among the investments in care infrastructure the experts have championed so far? U.N. Women, A Better Balance, and the grassroots organization MomsRising have called for measures like flexible work schedules and access to paid time off that enables parents and other caregivers to navigate climate impacts on child care.
U.N. Women's Nyirongo says, "Future-fit policies must address the 'hidden heat strain' on women and girls," noting the need to improve equitable access to cooling strategies and social protection "for poor and female-headed households disproportionately exposed to extreme heat risks."
A Better Balance's Dawson says such updates can include workplace policies that enable parents to take paid time off when schools or camps close or when children need to be at home recovering from a heat-related illness or safe from wildfire smoke.
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director and CEO of MomsRising, told CG, "Climate change is already disrupting our ability to find work and care, and we need to address the climate crisis and the care crisis in tandem."
"Not only will building a care infrastructure lift families, businesses, and economies, these policies will better position societies to cope with climate emergencies," she said. "There's no time to waste."
Kirsten Krueger contributed to the editing of this article.
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