Building Climate-Resilient Cities That Work for Women

Indian cities are expanding rapidly and heating up at rapid rates. Heatwaves occur at earlier times of the year, last longer and exceed 45°C one city at a time. India reported more than 48,000 suspected heatstroke cases and more than 160 heatstroke deaths in 2024 alone(Kulkarni & Ray, 2025). Cities have responded by developing a heat action plan, a climate adaptation plan, and “resilience” plans. But all of these plans have one missing component: they are designed by the average ungendered citizen, which doesn't exist.

Women's experience of the city is different: the way they move across it, the places they work, the way they manage the temperature of their houses, and how climate shocks impact their bodies. Not accounting for this difference is not only unfair policy; it is fundamentally wrong. It renders it inoperative.

The city was never designed with her in mind

This was a "default commuter" who commuted once a day, from home to a single work location, and was the basis of much of the urban infrastructure development around the world, in India. It's a pattern that is not often followed by women's mobility. In India, around 45% of all women walk to work while nearly 84% of women's journeys take place on public transport, as women have to make several stops in a day to serve and provide for their families while on the way to work, or running errands. Routine urban planning of commuter transportation networks, footpaths and street lighting ignores the majority of women's daily journeys because they are involved in a single trip (Hollannavar, 2025).

This is not only a problem; it's a climate issue! Households are encouraged to use private vehicles due to poorly lit streets and less reliable public transit, which contributes to higher emissions. However, there is one city that has moved in a different direction: Vienna has been systematically mainstreaming gender into planning since the 1990s and has implemented more than 60 pilot projects in the areas of public space, transport and housing, such as wider, better-lit footpaths, housing complexes with shared courtyards and on-site childcare. The message of this lesson is clear: gender-responsive design and low-carbon design reinforce each other rather than compete with one another (Hollannavar, 2025).

Heat doesn't fall evenly

The largest gender blind spot in planning for climate change is the heat wave. Most heat action plans are geared to outdoor daytime activities of construction workers, traffic police and street vendors. This is missing out on the amount of heat women actually face at home. While cooking is still predominantly considered "women's work" and a home with a tin roof is cooking at an external temperature of 44°C, the woman is absorbing heat that is seldom taken into account in the plans. In urban slums, houses built with asbestos or tin roofing may be many degrees warmer inside than the outside air, and existing plans typically don't account for or monitor this indoor heat load(Real Shee Power, 2026).

Extreme heat also carries specific health risks for women that general plans overlook, including complications during pregnancy and childbirth, disrupted menstrual and reproductive health, and higher risk during breastfeeding(Muttreja et al., 2025). A cooling centre that isn't a safe, women-accessible space or a water distribution point that requires long queues in the open sun fails the very people most exposed to indoor and domestic heat.

What gender-blind resilience actually costs

Scientists behind the study of city climate action planning in India have concluded that while most plans illustrate their technical knowledge of climate science, they do not address questions of gender, equity or inclusion(Muttreja et al., 2025). This is important because women's exposure to climate effects differs when it comes to travelling long distances to access water or fuel, especially as climate change exacerbates water and fuel shortages, in addition to their domestic duties. Any resilience plan which assumes the word "the urban population" is a single entity will never reflect actual vulnerability, as class, gender, age and place determine how a hazard is actually felt.

A governance gap exists as well. India's 74th Constitutional Amendment transferred urban planning to the ward and city levels, but the local governments have limited capacities to address gender issues, and women's involvement in the development of the climate change smart urban programmes is still low. When climate plans are made, if women aren't at the table, their pattern of risk isn't captured in policy(Climate & Network, 2021).

What's already working

The fortunate answer is that feasible ones are out there, a number of which are homegrown. The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) and the Mahila Housing Trust have introduced parametric heat insurance for informal women workers in Gujarat cities such as Ahmedabad, Surat and Vadodara, that automatically pays out on the breach of the threshold level of heat loss and medical expenses without any manual intervention(UpBeat, 2025). Women-led heat management projects in Ahmedabad have enhanced cooling and awareness activities in informal settlements, and women-led urban farming projects in Bengaluru and Pune are creating income opportunities while contributing to recycling organic waste (Singh, 2023). One more step at the policy level, where Kerala made it mandatory for 10% of funds allocated for urban plans to be spent on projects that benefit women(Hollannavar, 2025).

These examples all have one thing in common: women are not just a passive consequence of climate change, but they are planners, insurers, farmers, and decision-makers who see urban risk from the inside.

Getting the lens right

Creating climate-resilient cities that are inclusive for women does not need to be a brand new resilience framework; it needs to change the default thinking within the frameworks we have. That means:

Establishing heat exposure maps not only for outdoor labour sites but also for indoor workplaces and informal work environments.
Creating transit, lighting, and footpaths around multi-stop caregiving-related mobility patterns, rather than single mobility patterns.
Incorporating women into the planning processes of the ward and city, beyond just after plans are completed.
Provide financing and scaling of existing and proven-by-practice models such as heat insurance and women-led cooling.

It is not only a fair signpost that cities that succeed with this also tend to be cooler, lower-carbon and truly resilient for all, as Vienna to Ahmedabad has shown. A climate strategy which ignores half the city's population was never going to be climate resilient in the first place.

Sources

Her Conversation

Building Climate-Resilient Cities That Work for Women

Building Climate-Resilient Cities That Work for Women

The city was never designed with her in mind

Heat doesn't fall evenly

What gender-blind resilience actually costs

What's already working

Getting the lens right

Dive into HerVerse