Environmental security and gender: Necessary shifts in an evolving debate

Environmental security is a topic of study that has gained significant attention in the past few decades. Largely since the end of the Cold War, environmental security has come to represent a way for scholars and policy makers to link the concepts of traditional security scholarship to the environment. Many different conceptions of the relationship between the environment and security appear in academia. Yet despite the diversity of current work on the environment and security, there has been little systematic work done that examines the intersection between environmental security and gender. This article will address the necessity of including gender into the approaches on the environment and security. The environmental security debate exhibits gendered understandings of both security and the environment. These gendered assumptions and understandings benefit particular people but are often detrimental to others. Examining environmental security through a gender lens gives insight into the gendered nature of global environmental politics and redefines the concept in ways that are more useful, both empirically and analytically. The various environmental security perspectives have important, unexplored gender dimensions that must be uncovered so that the security of humans and the environment can be better protected. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Environmental security and gender

Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as \u27environmental security\u27 and \u27resource conflict\u27 have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections. This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate

Threats or vulnerabilities? assessing the link between climate change and security

This article analyzes how climate change has been strategically linked to security issues in recent decades by a variety of actors. I begin by elaborating on two general discourses on the relationship between environment and security, which I call environmental conflict and environmental security. Using discourse analysis, I examine the particular ways that security and climate change have been linked by scholars, policymakers and the media. I then explore some of the potential implications that discussing climate change through each of these security discourses have for policy outcomes within the climate regime. I conclude that the environmental security discourse is the most useful for stressing vulnerabilities and the human security concerns linked to climate change. © 2011 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the Aftermath of Earth, Wind, and Fire: Natural Disasters and Respect for Women’s Rights

Though much research has been devoted to a range of socioeconomic and political consequences of natural disasters, little is known about the possible gendered effects of disasters beyond the well-documented immediate effects on women’s physical well-being. This paper explores the extent to which natural disasters affect women’s economic and political rights in disaster-hit countries. We postulate that natural disasters are likely to contribute to the rise of systematic gendered discrimination by impairing state capacity for rights protection as well as instigating economic and political instability conducive to women’s rights violations. To substantiate the theoretical claims, we combine data on women’s economic and political rights with data on nine different natural disaster events—droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, extreme temperatures, floods, slides, volcanic eruptions, windstorms, and wildfires. Results from the data analysis for the years 1990–2011 suggest that natural disasters have a detrimental effect on the level of respect for both women’s economic and political rights. One major policy implication of our findings is that disasters could be detrimental to women’s status beyond the immediate effects on their personal livelihoods, and thus, policymakers, relief organizations, and donors should develop strategies to prevent gendered discrimination in the economy and political sphere in the affected countries