"Now What?"Addressing the Climate-Gender-Security Nexus at NATO

Courtney TIllman

June 20

By Siena Cicarelli and Cori Fleser

Edited by Francesco Femia and Erin Sikorsky

Introduction

At the 2021 Brussels Summit, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) endorsed its first-ever Climate Change and Security Action Plan,¹ with the aim to "mainstream climate considerations into NATO's political and military agenda."² The Action Plan focuses on four key areas – (1) awareness to understand the impact of climate change on NATO's strategic environment, missions, and operations; (2) adaptation by incorporating climate considerations into NATO's core tasks; (3) mitigation by helping Allies reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from their respective militaries; and (4) outreach with its partner countries, other international organizations, civil society, and industry to enhance the global response to climate change. Notably, NATO calls out the need to include gender perspectives as part of its climate change awareness efforts in the context of NATO's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policy.³ NATO began formally recognizing gender issues⁴ and environmental challenges⁵ in 1961 and 1969, respectively, but 2021 appears to be the first time NATO has officially acknowledged the intersection of these two global agendas, emphasizing the need for allied militaries to understand the "climate, gender, and security" nexus.

The climate, gender, and security nexus calls attention to "the linkages between climate change and conflict and how gender is a cross-cutting lens through which people experience both issues."⁶ This nexus amplifies how the impacts of climate change, either slow-onset events like sea level rise and desertification or sudden-onset events like floods and droughts, have gendered implications for local populations and can also precipitate conflict that exacerbates existing gender inequality.⁷