Operationalizing climate change, gender, and armed conflict in military planning

Keywords: gender, gender-based violence, military, climate change, armed conflict
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Military operations that include human security increasingly confront the impacts of the dynamic relationships between armed conflict, gender and climate change. A significant challenge to these operations is how civilian and military organizations respond to these impacts in a meaningful way - a useful, accurate assessment of how gender or climate risk might factor into operations. Armed conflict and climate change affect people in gender-differentiated ways. Women and girls are generally more likely to suffer the negative impacts of both differently and more severely than men and boys. What is not well understood yet is how these forces act on people in complex military operational situations where both gender and climate pressures are at work at the same time. This project suggests that taking a socio-ecological systems (SES) approach would allow organizations to determine whether the impacts of armed conflict and climate change have an antagonistic, compounding or synergistic effect on a particular population cohort, and importantly, the missions themselves.