climate resilient systems | caring futures | equal cities
Climate & Care (C²) Responsive Blended Finance Facility
Factoring care and climate (C²) risk into blended finance models
Resource Type
Initiative
Current Status
in design and feasibility phase, with tool validation & assessments planned across India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal
A South Asia pilot initiative across India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to design and test a care & climate (C²) responsive blended finance model, informed by household resilience insights and generating evidence for replication across emerging Asian economies.
01
What it is?
It develops and tests the design logic, targeting approach, and risk-sharing opportunities, and capital structuring needed to align public, philanthropic, and commercial finance with household level resilience needs that are currently invisible to financial systems. The initiative uses care sufficiency gap, care infrastructure maps and care affordability as practical proxies for climate induced stress, especially heat stress experienced at the household level, helping improve design, reach and targeting of blended finance models.
Anchored in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, the pilot is also designed to test the real world application of the Care Wallet, the Care Sufficiency Index and generate evidence and learning to inform blended finance design for urban climate adaptation across emerging Asian economies.
02
Why it is being developed?
Across South Asia, climate induced stress, like heat stress, is increasingly undermining urban household resilience through rising out-of-pocket costs, unpaid care work (disproportionately borne by women), income loss, and asset distress, particularly among low-income households.
Yet climate finance remains misaligned with these realities. Public finance is fragmented, and private finance relies on risk metrics that do not capture household-level stress, affordability constraints, or coping capacity. As a result, risk is misallocated, exclusion increases, and household resilience weakens.
This is a structural gap, not just a delivery failure.
This pilot will test & generate evidence on whether care and resilience intelligence can be used to better design, target, and structure finance and improve the effectiveness of blended finance models in climate stressed urban contexts.
03
What it enables in the C² architecture?
Earlier visibility of household climate stress
Care & climate related risks become measurable and actionable before household resilience erodes.Improved Household Resilience
Improved affordability and access to essential care goods and services, strengthening household resilience under climate stress.Women’s Economic Participation
Reduction in unpaid care burden, freeing time for paid work and enabling growth of paid care employment, particularly for women.Financial Inclusion
Development of lending and insurance products that reflect care and climate realities, expanding access to appropriate finance.Market Activation
Expansion of local care-related markets as care demand becomes visible and financing for care services improves.Climate Adaptation Outcomes
Reduced heat- and health-related stress through financing of climate-responsive assets and care-supporting infrastructure.Data-Driven Governance
Use of Care Wallet and Care Sufficiency Index insights to inform care, climate, and finance planning at local and national levels.
04
Current & Potential Use Cases
The initiative will support finance, insurance, government, and philanthropy to make earlier, more targeted decisions based on where care and climate risk intersect. A few stakeholder wise use cases are mentioned below.
Governments & public authorities
Supports precision social and climate spending by identifying where household and urban resilience is at highest risk of breakdown under climate stressCommercial banks, NBFCs & MFIs
Engage through the initiative to explore risk-sharing approaches that allow responsible lending in climate-exposed urban markets without excluding low and middle income households.Insurance providers
Supports the design of care & climate responsive insurance by linking coverage and pricing to measurable care disruption and climate stressPhilanthropic funds & programmes
Use the initiative as a structured pathway for catalytic capital, supporting affordability at the point of care and absorbing early risk to enable blended finance structures.Policy, research & global institutions
Supports the positioning of care sufficiency as a systemic resilience indicator alongside poverty, health, and financial inclusion metrics.
