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Abstract
The literature on the security implications of climate change, and in particular on potential climate-conflict linkages, is burgeoning. Up until now, gender considerations have only played a marginal role in this research area. This is despite growing awareness of intersections between protecting women’s rights, building peace and security, and addressing environmental changes. This article advances the claim that adopting a gender perspective is integral for understanding the conflict implications of climate change. We substantiate this claim via three main points. First, gender is an essential, yet insufficiently considered intervening variable between climate change and conflict. Gender roles and identities as well as gendered power structures are important in facilitating or preventing climate-related conflicts. Second, climate change does affect armed conflicts and social unrest, but a gender perspective alters and expands the notion of what conflict can look like, and whose security is at stake. Such a perspective supports research inquiries that are grounded in everyday risks and that document alternative experiences of insecurity. Third, gender-differentiated vulnerabilities to both climate change and conflict stem from inequities within local power structures and socio-cultural norms and practices, including those related to social reproductive labor. Recognition of these power dynamics is key to understanding and promoting resilience to conflict and climate change. The overall lessons drawn for these three arguments is that gender concerns need to move center stage in future research and policy on climate change and conflicts.
Highlights
The intersections between climate change and conflict are of increasing political concern
In South Sudan, resource‐constrained families will marry off their daughters at an increasingly young age: “This has been explained as a survival strategy to obtain cattle—vital among pastoralist groups—money, and other assets via the traditional practice of trans‐ ferring wealth through the payment of dowries, in the absence of other viable alternatives” (Ensor, 2014, p. 20). Such coping strategies—and the associated impacts on young women’s and girl’s security—are likely to become more prevalent with climate change resulting in increased drought frequency and livelihood pressures. This example, like those discussed in previous para‐ graphs, emphasizes the importance of an intersectional perspective: Educated women from powerful, wealthy, and/or high caste households are less likely to face the risks associated with collecting water or firewood, and are able to draw on alternative resources, including those of other household members, to enhance their resilience to the impacts of climate‐related disasters
Research on the inter‐ sections of gender, conflict, and climate change has, remained limited owing in part to the ten‐ dency to investigate this multifaceted interface only in terms of pairs of components (Fröhlich & Gioli, 2015)
Summary
The intersections between climate change and conflict are of increasing political concern. Recent cross‐case analyses find that climate change‐related impacts, including disasters, water scarcity and food inse‐ curity, influence violent and non‐violent conflicts within states (e.g., Ide et al, 2020, 2021; Koren et al, 2021) These findings are supported by qualitative evidence suggesting, for instance, that droughts and higher food prices increase conflict risks (Gleick, 2014; Heslin, 2020). These norms shape how crises, including armed conflicts and disasters, emerge, evolve, and are experienced by differ‐ ent individuals This understanding acknowledges that gender analyses focus on multiple, socially constructed notions of female and male, rather than on women (and their vulnerability, invisibility, or agency) alone. The conclusion sum‐ marizes how gendered power dynamics are important within the climate‐conflict nexus and discusses pathways for future research
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