the Caring Futures Resource Hub - Where care, climate, & decision making meet
- RIINE
- Dec 25, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 26, 2025
Translating care & climate thinking into real world decisions, before resilience fails
Why Care & Climate Matters
Climate induced stress is no longer a futuristic risk. Extreme heat, related health shocks, income disruption, and service breakdowns are already shaping how households live and work, especially low income households in emerging economies. And yet, a critical dimension of resilience remains largely invisible in how decisions are made. Care!
Increased reliance on unpaid care work supplemented by out of pocket expenses on paid care, is how climate induced stress is first absorbed at the household level.
Childcare. Eldercare. Disability care. Health support. Domestic work.
When systems are stressed, care systems are banked on to absorb the stress first. And when care systems are stressed, resilience weakens, quietly, cumulatively, and unevenly, hidden from economic and planning decision making frameworks.
Climate stress and demographic change are intensifying pressure on care systems. But public finance, climate policy, and private investment continue to ignore care.
That gap matters because care systems directly shape:
workforce participation and continuity,
health outcomes and household stability,
fiscal pressure and public service demand,
and the effectiveness of climate and resilience investments.
When care is invisible, risk is misread. When risk is misread, finance misfires. When finance misfires, households compensate, through unpaid care (disproportionately by women), rising out-of-pocket costs, income loss, foregone economic opportunities and asset depletion.
These pressures are not episodic. They are cumulative. And they rarely appear in climate finance strategies, financing risk models, or policy planning, until systems are already under stress and resilience is eroding.
The Caring Futures Resource Hub was created to change that.
Why the Caring Futures Resource Hub?
Care is a blind spot in economic thinking. It sustains labour markets. It builds human capital. It underwrites productivity and growth. Yet it remains invisible, in data systems, financial and protection products, budget allocations, infrastructure plans & policy design.
Across countries like India, Vietnam, Philippines in Asia and similar economies across the world, care continues to be unaccounted, dominated by unpaid care work, and undervalued, shouldered overwhelmingly by women, and treated as a private responsibility rather than an economic and systemic priority.
Care remains weakly integrated into economic, fiscal, and climate decision making, despite its key role in shaping how households and cities absorb stressors including climate induced stress.
Learning flows both ways, from research to practice, and from practice back into shared knowledge.
Evidence on what works, and what does not, especially on care and its interaction with climate induced stress, gender and other forms of inequality, and resilience is patchy and scarce at best. It is fragmented. Sits in silos. Applied learning from pilots and initiatives is seldom shared beyond project boundaries. This is reflected in some of the following,
care continues to be framed as a social or a gender issue, not a resilience risk
finance including climate finance overlooks household level stress, mis-allocates risk and delivers poor resilience outcomes,
and decision makers lack a shared evidence base to act early
The Caring Futures Resource Hub brings this knowledge together, not as theory, but as evidence, tools, models and usable insight for people shaping policy, finance, and urban planning and investment systems.
What is the Caring Futures Resource Hub?
Simply put it is a learning and knowledge exchange digital hub ,focused on emerging economies, with a strong emphasis on Asia.
It brings together:
research and synthesis on care, gender equality, climate induced stress, and resilience,
applied learning from RIINE’s pilots and initiatives, and comparable efforts elsewhere,
policy briefs and frameworks that translate evidence into decision-relevant insight,
and multi-country perspectives that allow cities and institutions to learn from each other.
The Hub is not a toolkit.
It is not a readymade framework.
It is a thinking space, a shared reference point where decision makers can examine assumptions, test ideas, and explore how care and climate intersect to shape economic, financial, and resilience outcomes for households, cities, states and countries.
The Caring Futures Resource Hub is also curated knowledge and evidence repository that brings together research, financing approaches, policy tools, and practical insights to help decision makers across financing, planning and governance ecosystems, improve their understanding on the structural role of care in shaping economies, workplaces, labour markets, understand how care & climate induced stress influence systems, shape economic participation, financial stability, and resilience outcomes.
Who the Hub is for?
Though the Caring Futures Resource Hub is a public facing, it is designed for decision-makers especially,
governments and city leaders shaping climate, care, labour, and social policy,
financial institutions and investors exploring climate and social risk beyond conventional metrics,
blended and catalytic finance platforms testing new investment approaches,
development partners and philanthropic funders seeking evidence for gender-responsive, climate-smart allocation,
researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of care, climate, and inequality.
Across these groups, the Hub supports learning across countries and initiatives, especially within Asia, where cities face similar shared pressures but often operate in isolation.
From knowledge to action
The Hub is also where we slow down to examine what is underneath the system, what are the rules, where are the incentives, the data gaps, and what default decisions are driving current outcomes. This is where we unpack insights by exploring the systems, decisions, and power structures that shape equal, inclusive cities, and resilient communities. And unravel the policies, investments, and innovations that can shift outcomes at scale.
Insights from the Hub inform RIINE’s work, models like the Care Wallet and Care Sufficiency Index, and initiatives such as the Climate & Care (C²) Responsive Blended Finance Facility – South Asia Pilot.
Learning from practice flows back into the Hub, strengthening the evidence base over time.
Launching the Caring Futures Resource Hub
Care has long powered our societies and economies in silence, and continues to be ignored. To launch the Hub we designed a 6-part Caring Futures Spotlight Edition of research backed deep dives to explore the state of care, in India and to document the patterns that drive equity and resilience, patterns that deny it & those that can shift it.
This Inaugural CF Spotlight Edition will offer evidence, insight, and imagination to make that shift, not just in theory, but in institutions, budgets, data systems, and workforce. It also reframes care not as a social issue or welfare concern, but as economic engine, vital to GDP growth, labour force participation, community resilience and intergenerational equity.
It does more than make the case.
It offers a strategic blueprint, combining macroeconomic evidence, global care financing models, frontline innovations, and recommendations to shape equal caring resilient urban futures across emerging economies.
More on this 6-part inaugural edition of Caring Futures (CF) Spotlight
Each Caring Futures Spotlight edition unfolds gradually. Comprising research backed, policy facing deep dives rolled out over 6 to 12 months, with 1– 2 long-form articles released each month. For reading ease, we sometimes divide a long-form article into 2 or more shorter pieces. While published as articles & working papers, CF Spotlight editions are public outputs of active research projects or model and tool development work, undertaken at RIINE. They are designed to help policymakers, investors, planners & practitioners, aka decision makers, act on care and climate, with evidence, clarity and context.
This edition begins with India, not because of the scale of its care investment deficit, but because RIINE is rooted in India. As a Knowledge & Resource Hub of Indian origin, we start with our home ground while drawing from global patterns. The care economy is our mirror & a map.
What to expect from the CF Spotlight Inaugural Edition?
Feature 1
Invisible Infrastructure Underwriting India’s Economic Development (3-part series)
Unpaid care work, worth over $955 billion annually, is the invisible scaffolding of India’s economy. This trilogy lays out the macroeconomic case for care, scale of India’s care investment deficit, and what’s shifting across countries advancing care as part of their core economic growth strategy.
Integrate care into national infrastructure, employment, and fiscal planning
Feature 2
Eldercare in India - Aspirations Without Architecture
India is ageing fast — but its eldercare infrastructure is fragile, fragmented, and underfunded. This article provides a policy-ready reckoner of India’s eldercare system, its gendered burden, and the reforms needed to prepare for demographic shifts.
Build a national strategy for ageing with care, inclusion & gender equity at its core
👉 Explore The Silver Shift - a special series under the Caring Futures Inaugural Spotlight Edition
Feature 3
Financing the Future - Global Models of Care Investment
From Uruguay’s SNIC to Japan’s universal care insurance, countries are innovating care financing. This feature distils global lessons on how care is being funded and offers financial architecture options for India.
Design dedicated budget lines, pooled public-private funds, and cost-sharing models for care
Feature 4
Care Satellite Accounts 101 - Measuring What Matters
India’s unpaid care economy remains invisible in national accounts. This article explains what Care Satellite Accounts are, how countries like Mexico and Colombia are using them, and what India must do to institutionalise care in economic planning.
👉 Launch a Care Satellite Account to count and value unpaid work in India’s economic data systems - Releasing January 2026
Feature 5
India's Care Workforce - Underpaid, Undervalued, Unprotected
ASHAs, Anganwadi workers, domestic workers, eldercare aides — India’s care workforce is essential but excluded from protections. This article maps the care labour market and proposes reforms for wage standards, recognition, and labour rights.
👉 Formalise, protect & invest in India’s care workforce, the human infrastructure of care - Releasing March 2026
Feature 6
India’s Path to a National Care Strategy - Building Institutions for a Caring Economy
India’s care architecture is siloed and scheme based. This article proposes institutional reforms from a national care commission to inter-ministerial coordination, to help India build a unified, scalable, future-facing care economy.
👉 Create a governance and financing roadmap for a national care strategy - Releasing later in 2026
🚀 Explore the full edition and track each release at the Caring Futures Resource Hub
👉 Read new releases of the Caring Futures Spotlight Editions
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📢 Share insights with your networks and decision tables
