From Care to Crisis Response: Why Humanitarian Relief Needs a Justice Lens
by Kate Power
Europe is entering a volatile new era where climate impacts are routinely pushing our emergency systems beyond what they were built to handle. Floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and storms are no longer “exceptional” events; they are fast becoming the baseline. This is the landscape of extreme climate adaptation, “adaptation measures required when climate impacts exceed the coping capacity or design limits of existing systems and institutions” (IPCC, 2022, p. 2410). In this context of "extreme adaptation," the urgent question is no longer whether we respond, but how - and whose wellbeing is placed at the centre of that response.
Care: the invisible foundation of resilience
Decades of feminist scholarship have revealed that care—whether emotional, material, or interdependent—is the quiet infrastructure that makes our societies function. While the "care economy" has a long history in research, its critical importance was laid bare by the COVID‑19 pandemic, which highlighted that "what we commonly refer to as ‘the economy’ would not function without the (often unrecognised) foundation of work provided by the ‘care economy’" (Power, 2020, p. 67).
Feminist theorists such as Joan Tronto have long insisted that care is not merely a "soft" add‑on; it is a political practice that determines whose lives are protected and whose are neglected (Tronto, 1993).
This insight is vital today. As climate impacts intensify, Europe’s resilience depends not just on physical infrastructure, like sea walls or power grids, but on care systems, social cohesion, and the everyday labour that keeps people safe.
Why European crisis response still misses the mark
Too often, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) in Europe is viewed through a lens of pure logistics: sandbags, helicopters, and emergency shelters.
The EU’s recent "preparedness union strategy" takes a step forward by advocating a "whole-of-society" approach, encouraging citizens to be self-sufficient for a minimum of 72 hours, promoting awareness-raising and school education for preparedness, and suggesting additional support for the voluntary sector (European Commission 2025). However, this "whole-of-society" response relies on the social capital and care systems that enable citizen and community agency: we need to acknowledge and support the care networks that sustain society in order to avoid worsening inequalities and hardships through our climate adaptations and disaster responses.
Disasters are never solely "natural" events. They expose and deepen existing inequalities, revealing exactly whose needs are systematically overlooked.
Care filling the gaps: citizen agency in the 2021 Ahr Valley floods
The 2021 Ahr valley floods offer a stark lesson in what happens when formal systems fail. Research shows that when official disaster mechanisms collapsed, citizens stepped in to create what Dittmer and Lorenz (2024) call a "semiprofessional crisis management team".
Residents rapidly organised food distribution, medical support, information sharing, and emotional care, often acting faster and more effectively than official responders. These efforts were rooted in long‑standing local networks, cooperatives, and neighbourhood ties. However, this reliance on self‑organisation also highlighted deep inequalities: communities with strong existing social infrastructure mobilized quickly, while others faced significant barriers to recovery. This case illustrates the immense power of collective agency, but also the injustice of relying on citizens to compensate for systemic failures.
What the 2022 heatwaves revealed about care and inequality
During the 2022 heatwaves in England, frontline responders described a system stretched to its breaking point. Interviews with emergency services, local authorities, civil‑society groups, and utilities revealed that heat impacts cascaded across sectors, from overwhelmed health services to transport failures and rising mental‑health emergencies (Howarth et al., 2024; Mehryar et al., 2025).
Those hit hardest were already living with structural disadvantages: people in poor‑quality housing, older adults, outdoor workers, and communities with limited access to cooling or green space. These were not isolated "failures" but symptoms of a wider care deficit: a system that was simply never designed with these populations in mind.
Effective responses often came from civil society rather than the state: neighbourhood groups checking on isolated residents, charities providing water and shade, and local organisations translating heat warnings for migrant communities. These actions filled critical gaps left by overstretched formal systems, demonstrating that care is not peripheral to climate resilience: it is central to it.
Extreme adaptation requires care‑centred governance
If Europe is to adapt to a harsher climate, HADR must evolve from reactive emergency response to "care‑centred adaptation governance".
Fortunately, policy frameworks are catching up. The European Environment Agency´s (EEA) work on "Just Resilience," emphasises that adaptation must reduce unequal burdens and ensure fairness in who benefits from protection (EEA 2025). This framework recognises that adaptation isn't just about technical fixes, but about addressing the systemic inequalities that leave some groups more exposed than others (EEA 2025).
To fully realise this, we must:
• Recognise care as critical infrastructure: It is as essential as energy grids or flood defences.
• Embed justice into adaptation planning: Ensuring that those most exposed have a meaningful say in decisions.
• Invest in psychosocial resilience: Acknowledging that trauma, displacement, and loss are long‑term climate impacts.
• Support frontline workers: Valuing the carers, nurses, firefighters, and volunteers whose labour holds communities together.
This approach aligns with emerging climate‑security research, which argues that adaptation must be conflict‑sensitive, participatory, and attentive to inequality (Nadiruzzaman et al., 2022).
Agency: The untapped driver of care and resilience
One of the most overlooked resources in European adaptation is collective agency. Extreme events repeatedly show that citizens, neighbourhood groups, migrant associations, and local organisations are often the first to respond - and the last to leave.
Across Europe, we are seeing citizen‑led mutual aid networks emerging during floods and wildfires, and civil‑society organisations providing translation, transport, and food before official systems mobilise. Local authorities and NGOs are experimenting with resilience hubs and participatory risk mapping, while frontline workers advocate for safer conditions.
These forms of agency echo what Bendfeldt and Basham (2025) call "constellations of care": networks of solidarity that protect people when state systems falter.
Europe could also learn valuable lessons here from the Global South. The Climate & Care Initiative provides much-needed expertise on the intersections of these crises, highlighting how unpaid care work often functions as "invisible adaptation" that stabilises communities during shocks (Climate & Care Initiative 2024a). Their blueprints for "care-centred climate finance" offer wisdom that Europe would do well to heed: care systems are not just social safety nets, but fundamental climate infrastructure (Climate & Care Initiative (2024b).
This aligns with recent research from the PanAfrican Climate Justice Alliance and Pro(to)topia, Towards an African Just Resilience Framework, which notes that successful adaptation, preparedness and disaster response is rooted in justice, participation, and community‑led decision‑making, not imposed from above (Power et al., 2025).
Building a Crisis Response Grounded in Care and Justice
To prepare for "extreme adaptation," Europe has the opportunity to transform its approach to safety, moving beyond impersonal, top-down mechanisms to embrace a future grounded in care, solidarity, and shared responsibility. This shift invites us to design relief systems that value human relationships as much as technical equipment, ensuring everyone has fair access to essentials like cooling and shelter while championing community resilience as the heart of true adaptation.
As RAND Europe notes, climate change will inevitably increase the demand for defence logistics in HADR operations, offering untapped potential for collaboration with volunteers and charities to build "greater societal resilience and preparedness" (Retter et al., 2021: 18). But logistics alone cannot build resilience. True resilience requires something more human: a commitment to fairness, connection, and communities looking out for one another.
References
Bendfeldt, L., & Basham, V. M. (2025). Beyond the state: reimagining protection as constellations of care. Critical Studies on Security, 13(1), 113-116. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2024.2413751?utm_source=researchgate.net&utm_medium=article
Climate & Care Initiative (2024a). Climate Change and Care Work: Integrated Solutions for Intersecting Crises. The Asia Foundation and International Development Research Centre (IDRC). https://climateandcareinitiative.org/publications/
Climate & Care Initiative (2024b). Centering Care in Climate Finance: A Feminist Blueprint for Adaptation, Resilience, and Climate Justice. https://climateandcareinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Centering-Care-in-Climate-Finance.pdf
Dittmer, C., & Lorenz, D. F. (2024). Emergent, extending, expanding and established citizen disaster response in the German Ahr valley flood in 2021. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 105, 104394. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420924001560
European Commission (2025). EU preparedness union strategy. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/preparedness_en
European Environment Agency (2025). Just Resilience: overcoming inequalities in climate risks and adaptation action. Climate-ADAPT. https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/eu-adaptation-policy/key-eu-actions/just-resilience
Howarth, C., Mcloughlin, N., Armstrong, A., Murtagh, E., Mehryar, S., Beswick, A., ... & Stuart-Watt, A. (2024). Turning up the heat: Learning from the summer 2022 heatwaves in England to inform UK policy on extreme heat. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Turning-up-the-heat-learning-from-the-summer-2022-heatwaves-in-England-to-inform-UK-policy-on-extreme-heat.pdf
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (H.-O. Pörtner et al., Eds.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
Mehryar, S., Howarth, C., & Conway, D. (2025). Heat risk interdependencies in the UK: Implications for adaptation. Earth's Future, 13(7), e2024EF005797. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/publication/heat-risk-interdependencies-in-the-uk-implications-for-adaptation/
Nadiruzzaman, M., Scheffran, J., Shewly, H. J., & Kley, S. (2022). Conflict-sensitive climate change adaptation: a review. Sustainability, 14(13), 8060. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/13/8060
Lorek, S., Power, K., & Parker, N. (2023). Economies that dare to care. Hot or Cool Institute. https://hotorcool.org/publications/economies-that-dare-to-care-achieving-social-justice-and-preventing-ecological-breakdown-by-putting-care-at-the-heart-of-our-societies/
Power, K. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families. Sustainability: Science, practice and policy, 16(1), 67-73. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1776561
Power, K., Mwangi, C., Kalume, R. N., Charveriat, C. (2025) Towards an African Just Resilience Framework. Climate Justice Impact Fund for Africa (CJIFA). https://cjifa.org/index.php?option=com_sppagebuilder&view=page&id=85&Itemid=493&lang=en
Retter, L., Knack, A., Hernandez, Z., Harris, R., Caves, B., Robson, M., & Adger, N. (2021). Crisis response in a changing climate: implications of climate change for UK defence logistics in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) and military aid to the civil authorities (MACA) operations. RAND. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1024-1.html
Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003070672/moral-boundaries-joan-tronto