Protecting Women Environmental Defenders: Lessons from Colombia

Aug 6, 2026 | Juanita Serrano Zapata
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security

For women environmental defenders, protecting the environment is inseparable from peacebuilding, protecting human rights, and territorial survival. In Colombia, where I am from, women environmental defenders are often described as being “on the front lines” of the climate crisis. And we are. But this phrase only captures part of the reality. For many rural, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant women, defending the environment is not an abstract political cause. It is the defense of water, food, ancestral knowledge, community, life in all forms, and the possibility of remaining in their homeland with dignity. We are not only confronting climate impacts; we are also confronting armed conflict, extractivism, land dispossession, racism, forced displacement, gender-based violence, different forms of discrimination, and institutional abandonment. In a country where armed violence and environmental destruction often overlap, protecting nature is also a form of peacebuilding.