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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

For example, increased drought is negatively impacting the livelihoods of women and girls for whom agriculture is an important employment sector⁸ and, in some countries, has led to an increase in child marriage and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as families feel compelled to marry off their girls to secure dowries to support the family.⁹ A flood may worsen poverty and conflict conditions, forcing men to migrate to find alternate work and placing them at a heightened risk for human trafficking.¹⁰ While four times more people are displaced by extreme weather events than by conflict, the two are often interrelated.¹¹ The academic research on the climate, gender, and security nexus is deep. In practice, militaries should look out for how this nexus compounds destabilizing circumstances within their current and future operating environments.

Experts have extensively demonstrated that addressing climate change and its impacts on security is critical to NATO’s mission and core tasks.¹² If NATO is to become “the leading international organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security,”¹³ it will need to understand and be responsive to the climate, gender, and security nexus.

There are challenges to doing so in an environment of limited resources at the alliance and member-state level, including concerns related to perceived tradeoffs between NATO’s traditional mission and the gender and climate agendas, as well as tradeoffs between the gender and climate agendas. However, these challenges are easily surmountable without “reinventing the wheel.” Instead, NATO can focus on cross-integration: better embedding a gender perspective into its climate security work and incorporating a climate perspective into its WPS efforts. If intentionally pursued, this approach could help NATO address the climate, gender, and security nexus while optimizing the Alliance’s limited resources for both agendas – and, in doing so, enhance NATO’s overall mission. In this context, recommended actions include:

1. Continue to embed relevant climate considerations into NATO’s gender analyses for military operations.
2. Review NATO missions to develop a body of use cases on the impact of the climate, gender, and security nexus on NATO operations.
3. Identify the most likely climate, gender, and security considerations that impact military missions to help allied militaries incorporate these considerations more willingly and consistently.
4. Conduct organizational assessments prior to hiring external climate advisors to optimize their expertise and alignment within military structures.
5. Ensure Gender Advisors and Climate Advisors can help each other gain access to military processes and procedures to incorporate climate, gender, and security considerations.
6. Continue to advance the climate, gender, and security nexus within NATO’s broader climate awareness, adaptation, and outreach efforts.