Care and Solidarity: The Role, Strategies and Elaborations Created By Brazilian Women in Extreme Climate Events

This communication aims to contribute to care studies in dialogue with debates on climate justice and the Anthropocene, based on the experience of self-organized Brazilian women's groups within community reconstruction actions. These women, initially organized to generate income in solidarity economy groups, refocus their actions towards creating shared strategies for survival in the face of extreme climatic events, as we have seen during the droughts affecting the Amazon region and the floods that affected South of Brazil in 2024.

We start from two central arguments. The first is that women play a central role in promoting and providing care work, which is heavily intensified in extreme times. The second point is that, within the “circuits of care” that bring together different institutions and organizations to promote this care work, which is indispensable for the sustainability of human and non-human life, a fundamental and still little-explored element are the groups of self-organized workers in the context of the solidarity economy.

How do these women organize themselves to deal with and resist extreme climate events? What are the care activities carried out during extreme climate events and to whom are they addressed? What is the weight of these activities compared to other sources of care in the territories affected by these events? What is the connection between the bonds of solidarity built up previously and the actions organized during times of crisis? By trying to answer these questions, we hope to contribute to the discussion on care not only as a factor of overload, especially in times of crisis and extreme events, but also, and in an ambivalent way, as a repertoire of collective and community mobilization that resignifies, contests and challenges the universal narratives on community reconstruction actions and extreme climate events, positioning women as political actors.