October 2025 marked twenty-five years since the landmark Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Amid rising polarization, escalating conflicts, and the intensifying impacts of climate change, urgent action is essential. This means advancing women’s meaningful participation, especially in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected contexts and ensuring peacebuilding is both gender-responsive and climate-informed. To better understand how this can be ensured on the ground, we spoke with Ratia Tekenet, Climate Security Expert at the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), and Tanya Merceron, Climate, Peace and Security Advisor at the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS).
How do gender dynamics impact climate-related security risks? In South Sudan, the extensive 2024 floods forced people, especially women and girls, to crowd into communities living on the limited higher ground available, which heightened the risk of violence, including gender-based violence. Men were often compelled to migrate with cattle, which in some areas led to violent clashes over grazing rights. During the 2025 lean season in West and Central Africa, 52 million people were projected to face severe food insecurity due to conflict and extreme climate shocks – a crisis that hits women hardest as they are historically responsible for feeding their families and sustaining household livelihoods. These examples illustrate the disproportionate impact of climate-related security risks on women and girls and underscore the importance of systematically integrating gender-differentiated risk into climate, peace and security efforts.
While climate-related security risks pose significant challenges to peace, peacebuilding efforts in climate-vulnerable contexts can also open new opportunities for women’s leadership and participation. From South Sudan to West Africa and the Sahel, and in many other contexts, women who carry ancestral knowledge of their lands and resources are using it to foster sustainable livelihoods and build peace. In mission settings, they are introducing innovative methods such as community-based early warning systems and conflict prevention initiatives. Women also play critical roles in local conflict resolution mechanisms and infrastructures for peace. These examples highlight women’s dual role, as those most affected by climate impacts but also as agents of transformative solutions.
South Sudan: Where a Security Council Mandate Forges the Link Between Climate, Peace, and Gender
“Our mandate explicitly calls for the mission to address the adverse effects of climate change through gender-sensitive risk assessments. But for us, this isn’t a box-ticking exercise; it is the foundation of our on-the-ground work. We have moved simply from acknowledging the nexus to operationalizing it”, explains Ratia Tekenet, Climate Security Expert at UNMISS, based in Juba.
UNMISS holds a clear mandate to deliver integrated, gender-responsive, evidence-based analysis on the impacts of climate change. But what does that look like in practice? The mission’s Climate, Peace and Security Team works hand in hand with the Gender Protection Unit to make sure data tells the full story: how floods, droughts, and other climate shocks affect people differently. In Unity and Jonglei States, for example, floods push women, men, boys, and girls into very different struggles. Meanwhile, in Eastern Equatoria, droughts shape daily life in distinct ways across gender and age groups. By disaggregating this data, UNMISS is not just collecting numbers; the Mission is capturing lived realities that would otherwise remain invisible. This information has become a key tool for early warning and rapid response. But for Ratia, data is only one side of the story: “True security lies in understanding the lived realities of those most affected”, she stresses. Women leaders’ testimonies about overcrowding on high grounds during floods revealed increased risks of gender-based violence. That insight led to immediate action in the form of “twilight patrols” by UNMISS personnel in vulnerable areas to deter attacks.
UNMISS has also launched a flood preparedness programme that trains women not only in disaster response but also in mediation: “We make sure women are not only consulted but equipped to lead”, Ratia adds. While the programme is still in its early stages, groundwork has been laid to scale up implementation as resources become available. By linking testimonies to patrols and training to policy, South Sudan is showing how women’s realities can shape peace and security strategies from the ground up. Ratia described the October 2024 high-level workshop on gender, climate, peace, and security, organized together with the Ministries of Gender and the Environment, as “a milestone in advancing gender-responsive CPS planning and policy.”
For Ratia, challenges exist at every level. “Systemically, institutions often lack the capacity to mainstream gender in climate, peace, and security work. Women’s groups remain under-resourced and marginalized, and in fragile governance contexts they struggle for recognition as legitimate partners.” Operational obstacles are equally pressing. “Resources for sustained engagement are scarce, but the most significant barriers are cultural. Patriarchal norms reduce women to tokenism - they are present in the room, but their voices are too often dismissed or silenced altogether”.
Still, Ratia points to promising practices: “One of our most effective approaches has been creating a direct pipeline between national policy and community realities”, she notes. During cattle migration conferences, breakout sessions serve as safe spaces where women can discuss their priorities, align their demands, and ensure their voices are heard by nominating representatives to speak during the plenary discussions. Training women in both emergency management and dialogue processes, as well as collaborating with ministries, gender units, and protection advisors, has further strengthened the link between community knowledge and institutional strategies. “By connecting climate shocks with risks like conflict-related sexual violence, we are scaling up women-centered initiatives. That is how we translate commitments into resilience”, Ratia concludes.
West Africa and the Sahel: where Climate Pressures Deepen Insecurity and Women Drive Solutions
For Tanya Merceron, Climate, Peace and Security Advisor in UNOWAS based in Dakar, the nexus of climate, gender, security and peace is equally pressing: “At the end of the day, it is one reality that encompasses all dimensions - climate change, gender inequality, and security are inseparable”. These links must be understood across three levels: “At the policy level, advocacy is changing the narrative through tools such as National Action Plans on women, peace, and security. But we must ensure that climate dimensions are not overlooked in gender plans, and that gender considerations are not forgotten in climate strategies”, she adds.
Tanya highlights with emphasis: “At the operational level, we need stronger synergies across a rich ecosystem of actors - from local women’s organizations to academia. And finally, at the local level is where real change happens, where concepts and linkages are truly experienced”. In an effort to capture local perspectives, UNOWAS has been conducting climate, peace, and security assessments across several countries covered by UNOWAS mandate. Gender was placed at the core of these assessments to understand how different groups experience climate security risks in distinct ways. As Tanya describes it, the aim was to bring “real West African life stories to the concept”, understanding climate security risks not as abstract notions, but as tangible impacts on daily life.
The stories mapped by Tanya are numerous and impactful. One example she recalls is from a climate, peace, and security mission to Côte d’Ivoire that she went on in July 2025, where dwindling fish stocks in a coastal village reduced incomes and triggered domestic violence: “When men lose their role as providers, household tensions rise and women bear the brunt”, Tanya explains.
Another example of insights from Tanya’s climate, peace, and security assessments is from Burkina Faso, Benin, and Niger, where women’s access to microcredit projects is increasingly at risk. Although resources exist, women are often unable to benefit from them due to security constraints, mobility restrictions, and social barriers reinforced by the broader conflict environment. In a context where climate change is already eroding livelihoods and fueling violence, this exclusion generates a vicious cycle of vulnerability for women. Systematic barriers not only deprive them of essential support but also heighten their exposure to multiple risks. The lack of access to financial resources and the loss of livelihoods due to climate change increase women’s susceptibility and vulnerability to exploitation including sexual and economic forms of abuse, and, in extreme cases, to recruitment by armed groups that instrumentalize this deprivation as a means of coercion and control.
In this context, UNOWAS, together with UNICRI, hosted a workshop on Climate Security Policies with a Gender-Inclusive Focus in the context of Violent Extremism in West Africa and the Sahel. The workshop sought to promote the understanding that the impact of climate change and violent extremism were not uniform, but differed significantly for men, women, boys, and girls.
For Tanya, climate, peace, and security risks not only pose threats to women, but also highlight opportunities, particularly for advancing resilience, empowerment, and inclusive solutions: “Women hold vast reserves of traditional and indigenous knowledge in natural resource management, in conservation, and in dispute resolution. Recognizing this knowledge is essential. Women are not only victims; they are powerful catalysts for the transformative changes we seek”.
Gendered Perspectives in Climate-informed Peacebuilding: Lessons and the Way ahead
Both Ratia and Tanya agree that women’s participation - as women, activists, and agents of leadership and change - must be meaningful and impactful. As Ratia observes, simply inviting women to the table is not enough. Targeted strategies, such as supporting breakout sessions and community dialogues, are essential to overcome major barriers to women’s effective participation in peace processes, ensuring they have real space to contribute. Other measures, such as targets and quotas for women’s participation in decision-making bodies and supporting mechanisms such as women’s caucuses, women’s rights groups, and independent delegations of women are also needed to address this longstanding obstacle. Tanya echoes this: “Policies only matter if they reach the ground. The real change happens locally, where women’s lived experiences guide the response”.
While challenges remain, the experiences of our experts in UNMISS and UNOWAS show that progress is possible through concrete initiatives: from twilight patrols and flood preparedness programmes in South Sudan to Climate, Peace and Security assessments and missions in West Africa and the Sahel. Together, these approaches demonstrate that engaging local women as key stakeholders in gender equality, peace, and climate action - and advancing gender-responsive, climate-informed strategies - is essential to ensuring that solutions reflect local realities. Twenty-five years after the creation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, today’s challenges are more complex than ever. Yet these challenges only reinforce the importance of advancing holistic and locally grounded solutions that are rooted in women’s lives, and which take concrete steps forward from commitments to action.
Explore other key resources offering gendered perspectives on climate, peace, and security:
- Guidance Note: Integrating Climate Change into National Action Plans for Women, Peace and Security (Asia and the Pacific) (2025)
- Weathering Two Storms: Gender and Climate in Peace and Security (available in English, French and Spanish) (2022)
- Video: UNMISS hosts a workshop focused on gender and climate security in Juba - YouTube
- Brief: Advancing the Intersections of Gender, Climate, Peace and Security through the Women, Peace and Security framework (2025)