who own less, recover slower, and carry the burden of care
that never appears in disaster cost assessments
| Key Points |
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At the height of the 2022 floods, women in Lismore, northern NSW, were wading through contaminated water to reach children.
They had no cars. Several had no phones. The evacuation orders had come by text.
Disability care workers, overwhelmingly female, stayed with clients who could not be moved. Emergency shelters offered no privacy screening, no sanitary supplies.
In the months that followed, housing services recorded a sharp rise in women presenting with housing instability and domestic violence. The flood had broken open everything that was already fragile.
This is what gendered climate vulnerability looks like in practice. It sits beneath the aggregate damage figures, invisible in the official tallies.
Women own fewer assets to lose, carry heavier care obligations when systems fail, and earn less to rebuild.
They concentrate in the industries climate disrupts first. They get sick differently from the heat. They die less often in the acute disaster and suffer more in the long aftermath.
Heat is doing something to Australian pregnancies. A 2024 meta-analysis across 198 studies and 66 countries, including substantial Australian data, found that for every 1°C rise in ambient temperature, the odds of preterm birth increase by approximately four per cent. During heatwaves, that figure rises to 26 per cent. 1
University of Queensland researchers have spent years tracking maternal exposure to ambient temperature across Queensland birth registers, documenting associations between extreme heat in the third trimester and preterm birth, stillbirth, and low birth weight.
Their work points toward a particular cruelty: the pregnancies most exposed are in regional and outer suburban areas, where housing stock lacks insulation and cooling, and where women are less able to avoid outdoor heat exposure. As Australian summers lengthen, the window of reproductive risk widens.
For older women, the health calculus shifts. Respiratory medicine researchers have documented the long-term cardiovascular and pulmonary consequences of repeated bushfire smoke exposure, with elderly women facing compounded risk from pre-existing conditions amplified by particulate inhalation. The Black Summer of 2019-20 blanketed Sydney for weeks in smoke that frequently breached hazardous thresholds. Many older women in outer metropolitan and peri-urban areas spent that summer indoors, unable to open windows in summer heat, managing asthma, managing fear.
Vector-borne disease is expanding southward. Warming temperatures are extending the habitat range of mosquito species that carry Ross River virus and dengue, with coastal and peri-urban women facing elevated exposure through domestic and community care roles that keep them close to yards, gardens, and stormwater systems. The interaction between climate, ecology, and women's gendered use of space creates health vulnerabilities that standard occupational risk frameworks rarely map.
Australian disaster cost estimates run to tens of billions of dollars. They count damaged infrastructure. They record insurance payouts. What they leave out is the economy of care that holds communities together during and after disaster, and that economy is run almost entirely by women.
During flood evacuations, women coordinate children, manage pets, communicate with elderly parents, liaise with schools about disrupted schooling, and maintain the household's administrative coherence under conditions of acute stress. In recovery, they manage insurance claims, find temporary accommodation, register for payments, and absorb the emotional demands of traumatised family members. ABS time use data has consistently shown women performing a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work in normal conditions. In disaster conditions, that asymmetry deepens. 6
Women in frontline health and community services carry a version of this burden professionally. Emergency nurses, rural GPs, community health workers, and social workers, professions where women constitute the large majority of the workforce, absorb the cascading health and welfare consequences of climate disasters. The moral injury of managing inadequate resources against overwhelming need, of seeing the same patients return with new crises, constitutes a climate health impact on its own terms, one accumulating with each successive fire season or flood event.
The psychological weight of domestic climate adaptation also falls unevenly. Women in drought-affected households describe the daily cognitive load of rationing water, adjusting food budgets as climate-driven price shocks move through the fresh produce supply chain, preparing emergency plans, and monitoring fire risk apps. This is invisible labour, performed without support, without recognition, and without end.
Margaret Alston and colleagues at Monash University spent years in the Murray-Darling Basin during and after the Millennium Drought, listening to farm women describe what sustained water insecurity actually does to a household. The findings published in the journal Research, Action and Policy were stark: women reported depression, work-related family separations, marital breakdown, increasing financial responsibility for family sustenance as farm incomes collapsed, and escalating incidences of violence against them linked to drought stress. 3
Farm women in the Basin hold a particular structural exposure. Their unpaid labour, managing books, managing domestic operations, managing the social glue of the enterprise, rarely appears in farm income calculations. Their retirement savings are tied to land that loses value during drought. Their career continuity is disrupted by the cycles of agricultural crisis. The superannuation gap between men and women is wide across Australia, and wider still in rural communities where women's formal employment histories are interrupted by the demands of the family agricultural enterprise.
Climate change is intensifying the pressure on these women without a corresponding increase in support. The National Farmers Federation has produced agricultural outlook reports tracking commodity impacts and water availability projections. What those reports leave largely unexamined is the gendered distribution of the losses they document. Women own a minority share of agricultural land in Australia, inherit less, and have fewer liquid assets to draw on during prolonged income disruption. The Basin's next climate stress event will find them in the same position as the last, only older, and with less time to rebuild.
Dr Debra Parkinson's research is among the most cited in Australian disaster studies, and the core finding remains disturbing: domestic violence increases in the aftermath of natural disasters. Her qualitative research across two Victorian shires following the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 women, confirmed that violence against women rose in the disaster's wake. The data gap that made her work necessary, no reliable statistics had existed beforehand, itself revealed the historical resistance to examining male violence against women in post-disaster contexts. 2
Subsequent research has mapped this pattern internationally. A 98 per cent increase in physical victimisation of women followed Hurricane Katrina. A 53 per cent surge in family violence call-outs occurred on the weekend of the Christchurch earthquake. The mechanisms are consistent: economic stress, social displacement, alcohol, cramped temporary housing, severed support networks, and the concentrated exposure of women and children to men whose psychological resources have been stripped bare by disaster.
As bushfires intensify under climate change, this dynamic will worsen. The services designed to receive women fleeing violence, community legal centres, specialist DFV services, women's shelters, are the same services placed under maximum pressure by the disasters that generate the violence. In regional communities where services already operate on thin margins, disaster events can break the referral pathways entirely.
Climate-driven economic precarity compounds the picture. Farm debt, uninsurability in high-risk postcodes, job loss in climate-disrupted tourism and hospitality sectors, all concentrate financial pressure in households where women's economic autonomy is already constrained. The link between economic coercion and intimate partner violence is well established. Climate change is manufacturing the conditions for both.
Women on the island of Saibai in the Torres Strait have told the Australian Human Rights Commission that within their lifetimes they may need to leave the place of their birth, the resting place of generations before them. Sea levels in the Torres Strait are rising at more than double the global average, at around 6.4 millimetres per year since 1992. For low-lying coral cay islands composed of alluvial sediments only metres above sea level, the physics are unforgiving. 4
For Torres Strait Islander women, the stakes exceed the material. Women hold custodianship of Country in ways that are legal, cultural, and spiritual simultaneously. The erosion of shorelines, saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers, coral bleaching, seagrass die-back, the disruption to marine species on which communities depend for subsistence and ceremony, all of these are losses that accumulate in the body as a form of ecological grief that Western mental health frameworks lack the vocabulary to fully describe.
The Torres Strait Regional Authority has confirmed that most parts of the low-lying inhabited islands will eventually be lost to sea level rise. The UN Human Rights Committee, in a 2022 ruling arising from a complaint by Torres Strait Islander community members filed in 2019, found that Australia's climate inaction constituted a violation of their right to family life and right to culture. The legal finding has produced limited material change.
Aboriginal women across mainland Australia are experiencing related forms of dispossession. Changes to seasonal calendars disrupt the transmission of plant medicine knowledge, food harvesting practices, and ceremony across generations. The warming of Country erases the ecological cues through which that knowledge is indexed. Once broken, these chains of transmission do not repair themselves.
Australia's clean energy transition will require the workforce to more than double. According to the Clean Energy Council, the sector needs to grow from roughly 21,500 workers to more than 59,000 to build and operate the generation, storage, and transmission infrastructure required to reach 82 per cent renewable electricity in the National Energy Market. Half the population, women, remain significantly underutilised in building this future. 5
Women currently hold fewer than 39 per cent of clean energy workforce roles in Australia. Their representation in technical, trades, and generation roles is lower still. The gender disparity is sharpest in upstream positions, electricity generation, network, transmission, and field jobs. Administrative and support functions retain the familiar pattern: women concentrated in the roles that pay least and carry least decision-making authority.
In the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria's coal-fired electricity sector is winding down and offshore wind is beginning to scale up, the transition dynamic is revealing. The declining coal workforce is male-dominated and the subject of substantial policy attention and retraining investment. The day-to-day coordination work that makes the transition real at community level, the trust-building, community engagement, education, and social infrastructure functions, falls largely to women, most of it unpaid or in lower-paid community sector roles.
Jobs and Skills Australia has identified increasing women's participation as essential to the workforce scale-up the transition requires. The federal government's $60.6 million Building Women's Careers programme, announced in the 2024 budget, is a step toward addressing structural barriers. Whether it reaches the scale and depth required to shift entrenched patterns across STEM education and workplace culture is a different question.
Australia produces significant volumes of climate risk data. The Climate Change Authority's National Climate Risk Assessment, the work of CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and state emergency management bodies, all map hazard exposure, projected costs, and adaptation priorities. The gender analysis within those documents is thin. Systematic gender-disaggregated data collection across health, housing, labour, and disaster response datasets remains patchy. The information needed to design gender-responsive policy is, in many crucial areas, absent. 6
Australia's legal framework for disaster response, including the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework and state emergency management acts, references vulnerability but rarely operationalises gender equity in the specific, enforceable terms that would shift practice. Women's Environmental Leadership Australia's 2024 report on gender, climate, and environmental justice identified the vulnerability of women and gender-diverse people as amplified by intersecting factors including socioeconomic status, cultural and linguistic diversity, and disability, and called for systematic institutional responses that have been slow in coming.
Climate litigation is beginning to fill some of the governance vacuum. The Environmental Defenders Office has supported duty of care cases and planning law challenges that bear on the rights of future generations, many brought by or on behalf of women and young people. The Torres Strait complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee demonstrated the reach of international human rights law into Australia's domestic climate policy failures. These legal mechanisms are consequential but slow, expensive, and accessible to few.
The picture that emerges from the research is one of compound disadvantage operating across multiple scales simultaneously. Individual women in drought-affected farming communities face financial ruin, psychological distress, and elevated risk of violence at the household level, while the institutional frameworks designed to protect them contain structural gaps at the policy level. Torres Strait Islander women face existential dispossession at the community level, while the international legal architecture that vindicates their rights lacks enforcement teeth at the geopolitical level.
None of these problems is intractable. Gender-disaggregated data collection can be mandated. Disaster response frameworks can embed gender equity as an operational standard, not an aspiration. Clean energy workforce programmes can prioritise women in technical and leadership roles, in the communities most affected by transition, in the trades that will pay most. Climate adaptation funding can be directed to the community-level organisations, overwhelmingly led and staffed by women, that build the resilience governments claim to want.
What the evidence demands is a reckoning with the structural causes of women's greater climate exposure. Climate change does not create these inequalities. It finds them already in place, then deepens every fault line. The policy response that treats gender as a secondary consideration, something to address once the main work of decarbonisation and adaptation is done, has already cost women in flood plains and farm communities and Torres Strait communities more than any official damage estimate acknowledges. The arithmetic of delay runs through women's bodies, women's savings, and women's futures.
- Chersich, M. et al. (2024). A systematic review and meta-analysis of heat exposure impacts on maternal, fetal and neonatal health. Nature Medicine. See also: Dalugoda, Y. et al. (2024). Spatiotemporal Association Between Temperatures and Adverse Birth Outcomes, Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, University of Queensland.
- Parkinson, D. and Zara, C. (2013). The hidden disaster: domestic violence in the aftermath of natural disaster. Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 28(2). See also: Parkinson, D. (2019). Investigating the Increase in Domestic Violence Post Disaster: An Australian Case Study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 34(11).
- Alston, M. and Whittenbury, K. (Eds.) (2013). Climate Change, Women's Health, Wellbeing and Experiences of Gender Based Violence in Australia. In Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. See also: Yazd, S.D., Wheeler, S.A. and Zuo, A. (2019). Understanding the impacts of water scarcity and socio-economic demographics on farmer mental health in the Murray-Darling Basin. Ecological Economics.
- Torres Strait Regional Authority. Climate Change in the Torres Strait. TSRA, 2024. See also: Australian Human Rights Commission. Intervention on Climate Change Impacts in the Torres Strait. AHRC.
- Australian Renewable Energy Agency. (2025). Marching forward: the women leading the way in clean energy. ARENA. See also: Clean Energy Council. Clean Energy Australia Report, 2023.
- Women's Environmental Leadership Australia. (2024). Gender, Climate and Environmental Justice in Australia. WELA. See also: Climate Change Authority. National Climate Risk Assessment. Commonwealth of Australia, 2023.
- Australian Women's Health Alliance. (2025). Towards Climate, Health and Gender Justice: Addressing the Intersecting Impacts of Climate Change. AWHA.
- Victorian Women's Trust. (2024). Heat Waves and Gender Gaps: Navigating the Complexities of Climate Change in Australia. VWT.
- Gender and Disaster Australia. (2024). The Work of Gender and Disaster Australia. Presented at NEMA, 2024.
- Jobs and Skills Australia. Cited in: The Policy Maker. (2025). (Em)powered women: towards a gender-inclusive workforce for Australia's clean energy future. APPI.
- Australian Bureau of Statistics. Labour Force Survey; Gender Indicators, Australia. ABS, 2024.
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Mental Health Services in Australia; Australia's Health. AIHW, 2024.
- ClientEarth. (2022). Torres Strait climate claimants win their historic human rights fight against the Australian Government. ClientEarth.
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