Transforming care must be central to any bold vision of a greener future | Emily Kenway

Care work - paid and unpaid - has huge knock-on effects for the climate that can no longer be ignored

It is no coincidence that both care and our climate are in crisis. Addressing each requires us to recognise that we are vulnerable and interdependent, as a species and individually. This will only become more apparent, because - as the world gets hotter and consequently more dangerous - we are going to need to care for each other more than ever before. As initiatives including Naomi Klein's The Leap and the Feminist Green New Deal have explained, we need a care-centred approach to meet the demands of a future that looks very different to our past.

First, we must broaden our understanding of what constitutes a green job". Research by the Feminist Green New Deal has found that a majority of people identify solar panel installers as green workers, but far fewer consider care workers to be in the same camp. This shows us something important about our mindset. So far, we have thought in terms of greening highly polluting industries - turning from fossil fuels to renewables - rather than identifying what is simply green, ie what is low-carbon by nature. This is the difference between tweaking our current system and stepping into a new approach that makes different kinds of work central to our economy. From this perspective, care work becomes a core component of our future, as those calling for its inclusion in a green new deal have advocated.

Emily Kenway is a writer and author of The Truth About Modern Slavery