Climate, Peace and Security and Women, Peace and Security: Towards Gender-Responsive Climate Action for Sustainable Peace
Research Fellow Ingvild Brox Brodtkorb (2nd from the left) presented insights from NUPI's work on women, climate, peace and security in New York on 30 October.
The event combined a strong research focus with an interactive dialogue among policymakers, practitioners, researchers and diplomats exploring how to advance gender-responsive climate-related peace and security measures and strengthen policy coherence across the Women, Peace and Security – and Climate, Peace and Security agendas.
The panellists presented four different publications highlighting the diverse ways in which gender, climate, peace and security are interconnected. NUPI presented its latest Climate, Peace and Security Thematic fact sheet, co-produced with SIPRI, highlighting how gender, climate, peace and security interact with food insecurity, mobility, armed actors and political and economic grievances.
A second policy brief by UN Women shed light on the WPS agenda as a holistic framework for addressing the gender dimensions of climate-related peace and security, while a third paper by SIPRI and OSCE focused on gendered dimensions of climate-related peace and security risks in the OSCE region. A fourth study by Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) highlighted masculinity crises and femininity struggles in the context of climate, peace and security in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Although the gendered aspects of climate, peace and security are receiving wider recognition in policy circles and research, it is yet to be translated into effective actionable policies. There is however much potential in aligning the two agendas and fostering policy coherence, but this entails that climate considerations are embedded as a cross-cutting theme across all pillars of the WPS national action plans and that gender is systematically integrated in CPS frameworks. Additionally, it requires, among other things, sustained financial and institutional support to women’s groups and local peacebuilders, broad engagement and inclusive climate related conflict-prevention and peacebuilding, establishing coordination mechanisms across ministries and institutions, investing in women leadership and more research on men’s and boys’ gendered experiences.
Read the NUPI-SIPRI fact sheet here.