An Invitation to Re-imagine the Climate and Care Crises Together
“While care policies need to embrace the more-than-human world and ecological boundaries, climate policies hold the vital potential to recognize and uplift the care labor that sustains life. Bringing together climate justice and care ethics, the Earthcare Framework Report offers a foundational policy and analytical ground that places life at its core.
The climate crisis and the care crisis stand among the most pressing challenges of our time. Yet these two realms are frequently addressed within isolated institutional silos, championed by disconnected actors, and shaped through policies that never intersect.
In reality, the climate crisis radically alters the material, spatial, and ecological conditions under which care unfolds. Extreme heat and severe drought intensify the burden of care work within households; disasters paralyze care infrastructures, stranding individuals reliant on powered medical equipment and their caregivers in compounding crises. Depleted water basins, parched soil, and cities entombed in concrete threaten the life cycles of street animals and entire ecosystems alike. Conversely, sustaining human care fundamentally relies on clean water, breathable air, and thriving ecosystems.
At İhtimam Association, we developed this framework to confront precisely this disconnect:
Is it possible to rethink climate policies from the foundational ground of care and all life-sustaining relationships?
Throughout the report, we address the climate-care nexus across concrete thematic dimensions, articulating a transformative framework spanning infrastructure, urban planning, just transition, and local governance.
Within this framework, the report explores:
The Intersection of the Climate and Care Crises: Why these compounding challenges cannot be addressed in isolation, and the transformative possibilities opened by conceptualizing them together.
The Conceptual and Theoretical Framework: The Earthcare approach, care ethics, just transition, and more-than-human relations of care.
Thematic Intersections and Field Experiences: The tangible domains where care is reshaped across extreme heat, water scarcity, the energy transition, disasters, and urban life.
Holistic Policy Recommendations: Restorative, participatory, and transformative intervention axes designed for decision-makers and local governments.
Implementation Tools: The assessment canvas designed to evaluate the impacts of policies and interventions, alongside the field-informed Care Wisdom Advisory Board model.
This report serves as an open invitation to collective reflection and action for civil society organizations, policymakers, local authorities, climate activists, care workers, and everyone defending life across this shared planet.
Because the kind of Earth we will inhabit together will ultimately be determined by our willingness to acknowledge our vulnerability and extend care to all relationships that sustain life.
