Understanding Gender, Conflict And The Environment

Jun 5, 2017 | Alex Reid
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The importance of gender in our understanding of the environment and conflict is often camouflaged. Take, for example, the infamous natural resource exploitation that characterised the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the role of women in the exploitation of natural resources during the war is rarely acknowledged. Yet in the province of South Kivu in the eastern DRC, 70% of traders of illicit goods, including coltan, gold and copper, were women. Likewise, in Côte d’Ivoire, another conflict fuelled by natural resources, UN Environment recently documented gold mining sites run entirely by women in the centre-west of the country. These surprising figures reflect a mundane reality: approaches that fail to account for gender miss the fact that women are both frequently the primary managers of their local environment, and the main users of natural resources before, after and during conflict.

The pervasiveness of women’s responsibility for environmental management hinges on a gendered division of labour, in which women are often disproportionately responsible for providing ‘subsistence’ products such as food, water and fuel. This often-burdensome gender-specific role helps to explain the UNEA-2 resolution’s focus on the ‘specificnegative effects of environmental degradation on women’. This is important because, whilst a sensitive approach to addressing gender-specific vulnerability and resilience has been widely embraced in the field of climate changemitigation, such an understanding is still lacking in policy on the environment and conflict.