Women’s Resistance to War, Injustice, and Environmental Crisis
Publisher: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Author(s): Genevieve Riccoboni and Jacqueline Dyna
Date: 2025
Topics: Conflict Causes, Gender
Countries: Colombia, Lebanon, Spain, Togo, Zimbabwe
The root causes, manifestations and attempts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis all hold 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 current climate action failing to meet the ambition required, but many attempts to address this crisis lack a gender lens.
The WPS agenda, grounded in UNSCR 1325 (2000) and reaffirmed in resolutions like UNSCR 2242 (2015), offers a potential normative framework for addressing the intersecting challenges of gender inequality, violent conflict and environmental degradation. However, its full potential remains untapped in the context of climate and ecological justice. Where climate is addressed in existing WPS efforts, it is often framed as an abstract “threat” rather than a lived, gendered risk that impacts land, water and physical security.
At the same time, feminist movements are already expanding the WPS agenda implementation to include ecological justice — advocating for demilitarisation, land rights and transnational solidarity for women environmental defenders.
This policy brief explores these dynamics through several case studies, namely:
- The gendered impacts of lithium mining in Zimbabwe;
- Local-level water governance in Togo; and
- Ecofeminist organising against extractivism and militarism in Colombia.
Grounded in feminist peacebuilding frameworks, this policy brief highlights the urgent need to integrate climate justice into efforts to implement the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and vice versa. It 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 and concrete support to frontline communities who are experiencing the impacts of environmental crises, armed conflicts and ongoing denial of their human rights. Drawing on international research and grassroots insights — including from the recent work of WILPF members in Colombia, Lebanon, Togo, Zimbabwe, and Spain at the nexus of WPS and environment — this brief concludes with actionable policy recommendations for policymakers.
To be able to address the ways in which climate change is impacting peace and security, policymakers and WPS actors should:
- Recognise 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.
- Ensure women’s full participation in decisionmaking.
- Embed gender-responsive environmental governance in peacebuilding, humanitarian response, and conflict prevention strategies.
- Avoid securitised and militarised responses to the climate and ecological crisis.
- Protect and support women human rights and land defenders and swiftly act in response to threats against them.