Reports Highlight the Need for Further Consideration of Gender, Climate, and Security Linkages

Jun 22, 2020 | Magdalena Baranowska
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In a recent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) paper, Elizabeth Seymour Smith, a Research Assistant with SIPRI’s Climate Change and Risk Programme, explores the intersection of climate change, gender, and security in Women, Peace and Security (WPS) national action plans (NAPs) of 80 countries. Using qualitative content analysis, the article finds that states frame and respond to climate change and gender-based security in differing ways. Of the seventeen states that explicitly mention climate change in their NAPs, only three of these—the United States, Ireland, and Finland—actually outline specific action points for increasing women’s participation in climate resilience and peacebuilding. Throughout the article, Smith highlights concrete shortcomings in the existing frameworks, underscoring that “there is significant space and opportunity for the WPS Agenda and WPS NAPs” to “enhance women’s participation in associated decision-making on all scales.” Women must be given agency to respond to the climate and security risks they disproportionately face, rather than being discursively framed as victims needing protection.