What Climate Adaptation Can Learn From Queers

In January 2010, residents of Macawayan, a village in Irosin, Sorsogon, gathered around a three-dimensional model of their community. It showed the terrain on which daily life depended: homes, farmland, the Cadac-an River, and the areas exposed to recurring floods. Residents used the map to locate hazards and think through what would happen when heavy rain once again forced families to evacuate.

Among those gathered were the village’s young bakla. They marked their homes and identified the areas where each would collect relief goods during an emergency. As the discussion unfolded, they also spoke about the roles they could take on during evacuations.

The map was meant to make disaster risk visible. It ended up revealing something else—people whose contributions the community had not always known how to see.

Macawayan lies in the Irosin plain, where families living near the river may be displaced during cyclones and periods of heavy rain. A 2014 study described how young bakla experienced these disasters. They were often made to clean homes after flash floods and take on difficult, undesirable chores. Inside evacuation centers, arrangements rigidly divided into spaces for men and women left them with little privacy. Those assigned to men’s bathrooms sometimes endured verbal harassment.

The same young people also walked around the village collecting and distributing relief goods. They cared for children and cooked for their families or for people staying in temporary shelters. These were ordinary acts of community life, easily dismissed as chores. During a disaster, they became part of what allowed families to cope.

When the bakla youth joined the mapping exercise, their participation gave the wider community a fuller view of their lives. Their risks could be discussed alongside their abilities. Neighbors, local officials, teachers, and scientists encountered them as people with knowledge and a place in disaster planning. The researchers reported that the process helped recognize their capacities and reduce anti-bakla harassment in the village.

The project did not bestow these capacities upon them; it created the conditions for others to notice what had been present all along.

Climate adaptation is often imagined in physical form. It arrives as an evacuation center, a drainage system, an early warning device, or a crop bred to survive harsher conditions. These tools matter, especially in a country living through stronger storms, extreme heat, and other intensifying threats. However, their effectiveness still depends on the social world into which they are placed.

A shelter may withstand a typhoon while remaining unsafe for some of the people inside it. A relief program may have enough supplies and still fail to understand who can access them. A technically sound plan can miss relationships that determine how information travels, where people seek help, and whom they trust when systems are under pressure.

The experience of Macawayan suggests that participation is more than inviting people into a room after the important decisions have been made. People living with particular risks can see gaps that remain invisible from a distance. Their knowledge is shaped by the places they inhabit and the ways they care for one another every day.

Thousands of kilometers away, another queer community is putting this principle into practice under very different conditions. In Mutare, eastern Zimbabwe, prolonged drought has worsened hunger and economic insecurity. Mother's Haven, a network advocating for queer parents and their children, has provided queer women and transgender men with land and taught them to grow crops such as sweet potatoes, sugar beans, and tomatoes.

The farming project responds to climate pressures, but its work extends beyond the soil. Mother’s Haven also holds leadership and well-being activities for people who may encounter stigma in their communities, families, peers, and intimate relationships. Discrimination can make financial help and climate relief more difficult to access. A space where participants feel safe gives them room to plan and build livelihoods together.

In this setting, belonging becomes part of the foundation for adaptation. Trust helps knowledge circulate. Safety makes experimentation possible. People become more able to imagine a future when they can picture themselves living in it.

The temptation to simply package these stories as uplifting portraits of queer resilience can flatten the conditions surrounding them. Young bakla in Macawayan deserved dignity and protection in evacuation centers regardless of the work they performed. Queer Zimbabweans deserve food security and freedom from abuse, regardless of how productive their farms become.

Resilience becomes a dangerous compliment when it asks people to keep surviving what institutions refuse to change. The care provided by queer communities cannot excuse inadequate public services or discriminatory systems. Informal networks may help carry a community through a crisis, while governments remain responsible for disaster plans that protect people without first requiring them to demonstrate their usefulness.

The lesson lies in how these networks are understood and supported. Queer communities have often had to create their own forms of belonging when established institutions offered little. Those relationships can become sources of knowledge and care. Climate adaptation can learn from them without exploiting them as substitutes for public responsibility.

This principle belongs in the wider conversation about a just transition, too. Justice must remain at the center of the futures we build, whether societies are shifting toward renewable energy or confronting age-old gendered prejudices about who deserves a voice. A greener system can still reproduce the exclusions of the one it replaces.

Queer people are already among those working in environmental organizations, research institutions, inclusive agricultural programs, and communities responding to climate impacts. Their presence does not create a separate agenda for the climate movement. It reveals that the struggle for a livable planet has always contained many struggles for the right to live fully within it.

Pride asks the world to see queer people beyond the narrow roles assigned to them. The map in Macawayan asks for the same kind of attention. It shows homes and hazards, but also the possibility of a community recognizing more of the people who sustain it.

The question for climate adaptation is not simply whether queer people will be included in the future. They are already helping build it. The question is whether the systems taking shape around them are ready to recognize what they know and what they can do. 

Eunille Santos is a queer advocate and a communications campaigner at Greenpeace Philippines. He is currently taking up a Master’s in Development Communication at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, with his research focusing on the intersectionalities of the environment and queer justice.

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