Media Co-op/Style Events–DCAF
Organizations serving Yemeni women attended workshops in 2021 to assess their work in addressing the country's twin climate and conflict crises.
When the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition entered Yemen in early 2015 to “restore” the government to power after the takeover by Houthi fighters in the capital Sana’a, no one envisioned that the conflict would escalate into a full-scale war and last nearly seven years. Or that it would set off the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with a death toll of a quarter of a million, leaving 24.1 million people—80 percent of Yemen’s population—in need of humanitarian aid.
In March, the United States government announced nearly $585 million in humanitarian assistance for Yemen. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis—further exacerbated by the pandemic—now includes severe climate change impacts. With $4.5 billion spent by the United States on the Yemen war, a Yemen peace process could help disentangle the United States from the disastrous Saudi-led war.
A groundbreaking report that also came out this year on the work of women-led Yemeni organizations can offer key insights to address these overlapping crises.
Yemeni women, especially pregnant women and mothers of young children, are the most vulnerable frontline victims of climate-related hardships—as well as warfare-related chemical pollution, mismanagement of natural resources, corruption, displacement, gender-based violence, and the destruction of natural habitats.
To empower women’s leadership in the face of climate change and these other overlapping crises, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, or DCAF, undertook a year-long assessment that resulted in a groundbreaking report: Gender, Climate And Security In Yemen — The Linkages And Ways Forward.
Two Yemeni consultants co-authored the report: Dr. Nadia Al-Sakkaf, Yemen’s first female Minister of Information, a former editor at Yemen Times, and a founding member of the National Reconciliation Movement; and Muna Luqman, one of six finalists for the U.S. Institute of Peace’s 2022 Women Building Peace Award, co-founder of the Women's Solidarity Network, chair of Food For Humanity, and a member of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership.
“The project’s main focus was to train twenty-three women-led organizations in Yemen and build their capacity, raise awareness around climate change issues, and analyze the availability of any entry points for peace through climate change lens––which we actually found quite a few,” says Luqman.
The report focused on “fragile and conflict-affected states” (including Yemen, Mali, and Colombia) where climate change “endangers efforts to secure peace and security while deepening gender inequalities.”
Last year, DCAF designed a series of three-day participatory gender, climate, and security learning and advocacy hybrid workshops for Yemeni women’s rights organizations. Representatives of twenty-three organizations across seven Yemeni governorates gathered in four “clusters.” Beyond knowledge-sharing, participants heard from prominent climate change experts and advocates, including Tareq Hassan head of Arab Youth Sustainable Development Network and Bilkis Zabara, the former Director of the Gender Development Research and Studies Centre at Sana'a University.
Luqman and Al-Sakkaf documented the baseline extent of gendered climate change impact on Yemen’s peace processes. They reviewed survey results from twenty-five women-led organizations and interviews with more than thirty-five men and women, including environmental specialists, academics, and local NGOs and civil society organizations. Meetings with state and local stakeholders across Yemen helped define “awareness regarding climate change as an important entry point for peace,” says Luqman.
When workshop participants were tasked with identifying their core climate change related projects, they initially defined their work as purely “humanitarian.” Once they detailed their activities, Luqman realized that they had already been working at the intersection of climate change, gender, and peace without defining it as such.
In Yemen, extreme drought and flooding, rising sea levels, shifting rainfall patterns, and more frequent and severe storms are destroying agricultural lands, resulting in food insecurity and population displacement. The displaced are further traumatized, the report states, by rejection from host communities unwilling to share depleting resources.
Using siege and blockades, Yemen’s warring factions are also weaponizing water access. Control over natural resources, especially water, accentuates Yemen’s armed conflict.
Women-led civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to tackle these challenges. Their place-based knowledge and perspectives fill the wide gaps left by the local and international organizations. On Yemen’s remote frontlines, women-led organizations have helped facilitate negotiations to open humanitarian corridors, release detainees, provide water and food resources, and demilitarize youth and schools.
Women-led civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to tackle these challenges. Their place-based knowledge and perspectives fill the wide gaps left by the local and international organizations.
As climate change impacts strain resources even further, these organizations are empowering youth and women—those most directly affected by the crisis—to address it in their own communities.
Irtefaa Ameen Ahmed Sallam of the Yemen-based organization Cleaning and Development Fund, which participated in the assessment, highlighted in an interview how torrential rains crippled the infrastructure in Taiz (the mountainous southwestern city renowned for coffee production and now under Houthi militia control). Garbage pile-up there created an “explosion of the sewers.” She coordinated the garbage removal with large machinery and hired a team to disinfect the piles of waste to prevent infestation and diseases. Religious extremists threatened her to stay off the streets. But having lived with the ever-present “threat of death…..from missiles or live bullets,” Sallam said she’s undeterred from carrying on her “peace-making process.”
The ultimate outcome of the workshops was the Yemen Climate Change–Women, Peace and Security Nexus Network—a coalition of the groups that participated in the assessment.The first such network founded in Yemen, it is pushing for more effective and inclusive approaches to addressing climate change at all levels of government.
The Network drafted eleven recommendations for national, regional, and international stakeholders. These include topics from “climate considerations and their gendered dynamics in any future political agreements,” to “gender-responsive, impartial coordination,” to managing natural resources and addressing climate change, to “gender-inclusive and gender-responsive crisis response planning to coordinate” actions of security providers. The Network also called for women’s inclusion in “decision-making circles and policymaking,” the promotion of “positive coping mechanisms and sustainable livelihoods for marginalized women,” and education for women and girls to better cope “with climate shocks.” By increasing resilience in the “agriculture sector to improve food security chains” and to deploy economic empowerment measures, the recommendations request support and funding from the international community to address gender, security, and climate in peacebuilding.
Finally, the recommendations underscore how peacebuilding and gender issues must be “addressed in support for climate adaptation and resilience.”
“We are fighting to have this awareness to be fully integrated into the peace agreements that we hope will finally materialize,” says Luqman referring to a UN-brokered cease-fire that recently expired with fighting now resumed.