By Kate Metcalf, Co-Director, Wen
Kate Metcalf reflects on how conflict, genocide and militarisation deepen the climate crisis, undermine food security and place the heaviest burden on women, particularly marginalised and racialised women.
We know the climate crisis is not experienced equally. It is shaped by power, inequality, and by the systems that decide whose lives are protected and whose are pushed further into harm. Climate change is not gender neutral and neither is conflict.
Sadly, as the world should be investing in a greener and fairer future, we are watching resources and political will in many parts of the world shift towards war and militarisation. That shift deepens poverty, puts pressure on food systems and increases emissions, while also undermining the public services and local infrastructures that people rely on to survive. And as ever, women, particularly marginalised and racialised women, pay the highest price.
This is why an intersectional feminist approach is essential. That lens shows us clearly that war is not separate from climate injustice. It is one of the forces making it worse.
Women are more likely to be hit first and hardest by rising food insecurity, poverty, displacement and the erosion of essential support. UN Women has warned that under a worst case climate scenario, more than 158 million additional women and girls could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2050. UN Women also says that 676 million women and girls lived within 50 kilometres of armed conflict in 2024, the highest number recorded in decades.
Those figures matter because they tell a bigger story. War and conflict do not only destroy buildings. It destroys the conditions that make life possible. It damages food production, water systems and local economies. It displaces families and increases the risk of violence against women and girls and forces people into impossible choices. These are not parallel crises. They are overlapping realities that compound one another.
We are seeing that reality in Palestine, where genocide, mass displacement and the destruction of infrastructure have laid bare the human cost of war. Any serious conversation about climate justice and gender justice has to be able to name this.
We can see the wider global risks in the warnings linked to the US-Israel war on Iran.
This matters here in the UK too. Our food systems are interconnected and when conflict pushes up fuel and fertiliser costs, the effects are felt quickly through supply chains and household budgets, with warnings of food shortages by the summer. And hardest by those already struggling to afford essentials.
We also need to be honest about the climate impact of militarisation itself. Militaries are among the world’s biggest institutional emitters, yet their role in driving climate breakdown is still too often pushed to the margins of climate debate. At the same time, rising military spending diverts resources away from social care, public health, and climate action.
Feminist climate justice means refusing to treat war, poverty, hunger, toxic exposure and climate breakdown as separate issues. It means asking what real safety would look like, while centering care, health, dignity and collective survival. It means listening to women, particularly marginalised and racialised women, whose lives and leadership are too often pushed to the margins of policy and debate.
Our new Why women and climate? briefing is an invitation to look more closely, and to act with greater honesty about what this moment demands. Because this is about changing the systems that put lives at risk. An intersectional feminist climate justice approach asks us to build something better: economies rooted in care, food systems that protect life, and public policy shaped by shaped by dignity and justice, and collective wellbeing. That is the kind of change Wen is working for, and why this conversation matters now.
Read the Wen Briefing: Why Women and Climate?
Kate Metcalf, Co-director, Wen
Kate has over 20 years’ experience developing community and international networks within international development and environmental organisations with a focus on gender and social justice. Kate leads Wen’s Feminist Green New Deal project aiming to ensure that women, racialised and marginalised groups are central to the green economy.
