The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat, but a lived reality deeply entangled with systems of inequality and injustice. Its root causes, impacts, and the strategies to mitigate or adapt to it all carry profound implications for gender equality and human security.
Women, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings, are disproportionately affected by the environmental, economic and social disruptions caused by unsustainable resource extraction. They are already experiencing the impacts of the resultant climate and ecological crisis. Yet not only is climate action failing to meet the ambition required, but many attempts to address this crisis lack a gender lens.
A New Policy Paper from WILPF
WILPF has just released a new policy paper offering key recommendations for linking the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda with climate and environmental governance. The paper draws on work conducted throughout 2024 by WILPF members in Colombia, Togo, and Zimbabwe, who explored the intersections between gender, peace, and the environment in their respective contexts.
Based on their findings, this paper explores some of the existing literature around gender, peace, and environment and looks at three case studies:
- In Zimbabwe: Lithium extraction is unfolding in ways that systematically undermine women’s rights, livelihoods and security, and which replicate colonial exploitation. Lithium mining operations are displacing families without compensation, and those living around mines face exploitative conditions and gender-based violence.
- In Togo: Water insecurity is creating myriad challenges for local communities, including health issues, increased water collection burdens that keep girls out of school due to gendered social norms, and local-level conflicts over water access.
- In Colombia: Women leaders including from Indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities are confronting the interplay between extractivist and unsustainable development models and evolving cycles of violence relating to illicit industries and socioenvironmental conflicts.
Rethinking Security and Climate Through a Gender Lens
This paper calls for a shift towards understanding the climate and ecological crisis as a gendered risk rooted in systems of inequality, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and extractivism.
It also calls for both structural change as well as concrete support to frontline communities who are experiencing the impacts of environmental crises, armed conflicts, and ongoing denial of their human rights.
Key Recommendations
The paper makes several recommendations to policymakers and others working on these key issues. These include:
- Recognising environmental harm and resource extraction as drivers of gendered insecurity.
- Mainstream climate risk across all four WPS pillars: participation, protection, prevention and relief and recovery. On participation, ensure women — especially from frontline communities — are enabled to take on genuine leadership in decision making, not merely treated as vulnerable populations.
- Embed gender-responsive environmental governance in peacebuilding, humanitarian response, and conflict prevention strategies, and avoid securitised and militarised responses to the climate and ecological crisis.
- Support women leaders who are resisting extractivism, militarism and injustice, and protect women human rights and land defenders, including from Indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities, from threats and reprisals, and swiftly act in response to violence against them.
