Climate change poses a significant threat to women’s security. Its impacts – from environmental degradation to the destruction of livelihoods – hinder efforts to build or consolidate peace and stability. Further, it exacerbates intercommunal tensions, which tend to prolong conflict. Climate change not only affects women disproportionately but also worsens already existing structural and social inequalities. Communities have less ability to adapt to and be resilient to climate change if there are/due to gender inequalities. Effective policy and programming on climate and security must therefore be shaped with a gendered lens and informed by localized knowledge and experience.
Several UN bodies (including the UN Human Rights Council, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the CEDAW Committee, and the UN Secretary-General in his reports on Women, Peace and Security) have articulated this clearly. Furthermore, many states have committed to promoting women’s resilience to climate change in their 1325 National Action Plans.
In response to the needs of policymakers and practitioners, DCAF’s work in Colombia, Mali, and Yemen has empowered women from 68 women’s organizations to become more involved and visible in climate and security dialogues. DCAF’s initiatives helped them find a space to connect and develop joint, targeted, and evidence-based advocacy approaches on climate and environmental issues. This work led to the creation of networks of women activists and women-led organizations established in each country to develop advocacy action plans on the climate, gender, and peacebuilding nexus. The ensuing eight common recommendations suggest ways to draft mutually reinforcing policy on climate change and gender equality:
- Apply an intersectional human security lens to the conflict/climate nexus
- Address environmental damage alongside climate change
- Prioritize gender equality goals in all action on climate and environment
- Address the linkages between climate and environment, peacebuilding and gender equality in an integrated way
- Avoid securitizing responses to the climate and environmental crisis
- Mitigate the security sector’s own climate and environmental impact
- Ensure women’s meaningful participation and women’s leadership
- Earmark resources for women in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
By strengthening inclusion and equality, these policies contribute to the mitigation of women’s vulnerability and challenge the structural inequities that perpetuate insecurity.
Women representatives of each of the three countries received support to amplify their agency at the regional and international levels. This enhanced engagement with security sector actors and governments contributed to the consideration of intersectional and gender-sensitive concerns in response to climate insecurity.
The involvement of rural women’s organizations in climate policy has been crucial in disrupting the inequalities that are the root causes of insecurity or vulnerability and fostering dialogue between women’s organizations and security sector actors. By challenging discriminatory power structures and norms, the women representatives aim to be increasingly recognized as key experts and leaders, in so doing preventing the gender-climate-security nexus from becoming overly securitized. In that sense, this initiative is an inspiring model for Latin American states, such as Colombia and Mexico, that have adopted a Feminist Foreign Policy.