Feminist Foreign Policy with a View to Climate Issues

Climate change was first framed as a problem exclusive to natural science. Lately, the role of human behavior in climate change has been accentuated and with this an increased understanding of the significant gendered consequences of climate change. There is an urgency for the inclusion of women as policy makers in climate issues but there is also an urgency that a feminist foreign policy take the gendered aspects of climate change into account, for example in aid policies and interventions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that rural women in developing countries are among the groups most vulnerable to climate change (also verified in early studies by Terry 2009, Dankelman 2010, Denton 2002, Mearns and Norton 2010, Oparaocha and Dutta 2011). Some effects of climate change are violent, and from immediate events (storms, fires and floods) and suggest that interventions in climate generated disasters must be conducted in a gender aware manner. Other effects of climate change are indirect with a slow type of violence affecting livelihoods and biodiversity, through heat, droughts and as water levels rise and require other strategies. Gender also matters, albeit in different ways, in relation to climate issues in richer countries (Aquilar 2013, Bendlin 2014, Kaijser and Kronsell 2013, Resurrección 2013). The Paper proposes a feminist foreign policy in the climate issue area that takes an intersectional approach where place, class, ethnicity, and age is shown to matter and overlap with gender.