For informal women workers, climate change is not a distant risk. It is experienced through extreme heat, irregular rainfall, water scarcity, and changing work conditions. These disruptions affect production, health, mobility, and income—often intensifying existing vulnerabilities linked to informality and lack of social protection.
For women’s cooperatives, climate stress also shapes how enterprises function. It affects planning cycles, costs, market reliability, and the physical spaces where work takes place.
Evidence from SEWA Cooperative Federation’s work shows that climate impacts vary across sectors but share common patterns. In agriculture, changing rainfall and temperature affect cropping decisions and input use. In urban settings, heat stress alters work hours, productivity, and safety—especially for home-based and cooperative-based workers.
The Workspace Mapping Study documents how extreme heat directly affects women artisans’ work environments, highlighting differences between home-based and shared workspaces, and revealing gaps in infrastructure and adaptive support.
Across contexts, climate stress often translates into greater unpaid labour, health risks, and income instability for women workers.
SEWA Cooperative Federation approaches climate change through the lens of enterprise viability and collective resilience. Rather than treating climate as a standalone issue, we examine how it intersects with governance, work environments, market access, and planning within women’s cooperatives.
Learning from different initiatives has helped frame climate responses that are grounded in women’s realities—linking adaptation to livelihoods, collective decision-making, and long-term sustainability rather than short-term fixes.
