On 12 November 2024, CCS hosted a roundtable on NATO’s efforts to tackle non-traditional security threats, including climate change and Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). The following summarizes the key points of the Chatham House Rule discussion.

By Siena Cicarelli and Erin Sikorsky

In 2021, NATO launched its Climate Change and Security Action Plan, which committed the alliance to mainstreaming climate security in its plans, posture, and international engagements. Since then, the Alliance has made notable progress in implementing the Action Plan, recently opening the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Canada (CCASCOE) and building critical internal climate literacy throughout the Alliance. 

This mirrors the institutional pathways used by other cross-cutting priorities like the WPS agenda, which has made significant inroads over the past 15+ years by leveraging binding UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) commitments and institutions like the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations (NCGM) to elevate gender considerations within the Alliance. As a result, there is more cross-cutting gender and climate policy today than ever before, including the Alliance’s explicit recognition of “the compounding impacts of gender inequality, conflict, and climate change on women and girls, with implications for security.”

However, given the ongoing war in Ukraine and major political shifts amongst leading Allies, both these agendas face the risk of being deprioritized or sidelined. As the Alliance looks to 2025 and beyond, gender and climate advocates must be prepared to overcome the perception that there is a trade-off between tackling climate and WPS issues and more traditional “hard security” issues. 

In light of these dynamics, key takeaways from this discussion included: 

Generating Operational Examples

Both the climate security and WPS agendas benefit from concrete examples that demonstrate their urgency and relevance to the overall NATO mission. This helps policymakers and operators understand the benefits of incorporating a climate or gender perspective into their work and minimizes pushback from more skeptical actors at the operational level. For example, some of the most impactful use cases of WPS came from NATO’s operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where gender dynamics were more central to the mission, and incorporating a gender perspective could have helped operators better engage with civilians. Similarly, examples of how climate change will affect military assets, critical infrastructure, and interoperability, such as inoperable Merlin MC3 helicopters and spikes in military disaster response, demonstrate the connection between the climate crisis and NATO’s overarching security interests. Attendees emphasized the importance of continuing to build these case studies, aligning gender and climate where possible, and better connecting operational examples to the Alliance’s core tasks.

Strategically Allocating Climate and Gender Expertise

A shared priority throughout the discussion was the need for not just more subject matter expertise generally but expertise in the right places and portfolios. For NATO, this requires a better understanding of which offices or mission sets benefit from gender and/or climate expertise – as well as whether a strategic-focused civilian advisor or more tactical military advisor would be most helpful for senior leadership in these spaces. At the same time, the gender and climate advisors already placed in the NATO bureaucracy need to be better incorporated into command and decision-making structures. For example, while the Office of the Special Representative for WPS and high-level action on climate security demonstrate that the Secretary-General supports these agendas, advisors on climate and gender remain left out of critical planning and logistics meetings, sidelined by commanders with limited time and attention, or invited to discussions too late to make a true impact. Furthermore, recognizing that even the most well-placed advisors cannot do these tasks alone, continuing to build a gender and climate-literate workforce via training and education will complement these personnel efforts. 

Leveraging Co-Benefits at the Gender-Climate Nexus

Finally, in today’s constrained financial and political environment, participants highlighted the potential “win-wins” of aligning gender and climate considerations. For example, with the help of climate experts on staff, climate considerations can be easily incorporated into the gender analysis already conducted by NATO’s Gender Advisors and Gender Focal Points. Similarly, as NATO commits to integrating “gender-responsive indicators in early warning processes, crisis prevention, and early response efforts,” climate security considerations and other human security factors, such as protection of civilians, can be incorporated as well. By creating gender advisors who are conversant on climate (and vice versa), these agendas can be simultaneously elevated and operationalized in the NATO structure.

Overall, the conversation emphasized that climate security and WPS have made critical inroads within NATO, but more must be done to insulate these portfolios against geopolitics, budgetary pressures, and national-level shifts. Creating gender and climate champions at all levels of the organization, compiling key use cases, understanding high-impact positions within the bureaucracy, and finding win-wins are all critical first steps in institutionalizing these portfolios and building a more future-fit Alliance.