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How ideas of gender and climate change intersect with our path to a livable future. When you think "climate change," who comes to mind? Who's doing the science, the reporting, the protesting, the suffering? In Women and Climate Change, Nicole Detraz asks where women in the global North figure in the picture, what that means, and why it matters. Her answers fill critical gaps in what we know about the politics of climate change and gender. Representations of climate change, like perceptions of gender, can make a profound difference in understanding expectations and actions around social, cultural, and political issues. Interviewing women living in the global North who work in the climate change sphere, Detraz examines the crucial links between notions of climate change and gender—in particular, how women are portrayed in climate change debates. Where is their presence or absence recognized? What tasks are they expected to perform? What factors influence their roles? The answers provide a nuanced account of the characteristics, conditions, and positions associated with women's activities in and experiences of climate change—a multifaceted portrayal of women that also demonstrates the generalization and essentializing that can hinder goals of sustainability and gender justice. Because gender is a social construction, Detraz reminds us, change is possible. Her book offers the suggestion, and the hope, that identifying connections between ideas of gender and climate change might also alter our vision of a livable future.

Table of Contents -- Dedication -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1: Introduction: How Are Gender and the Environment Connected? -- Understanding environmental politics -- Gender-Environment connections -- Plan of the book -- Notes -- 2: Sustainability and Sustainable Development as Gendered Concepts -- The concept of sustainability -- The concept of sustainable development -- Gender and sustainability debates -- Gender and sustainable development debates -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 3: Revealing Gender in Environmental Justice -- Gender and environmental justice -- Gender, sustainability, and justice as guiding concepts -- Notes -- 4: Too Many People? Gender and Population Debates -- Global debates about population -- Connecting gender and population debates -- Case study: the impacts of natural disasters -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 5: Too Much Stuff? Gender and Debates about Consumption -- Why the focus on consumption? -- The gendered nature of consumption -- Case study: the environmental and social consequences of plastics -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 6: Too Little Security? Gender and the Securitization of the Environment -- Connections between security and the environment -- Gender, environment, and security -- Case study: food security -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 7: Conclusion: Gendered Sustainability and Justice in Climate Change Debates -- Gender and climate change -- Revealing gender in environmental debates -- Conclusions -- Notes -- References -- Index -- End User License Agreement

"Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as 'environmental security' and 'resource conflict' have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections.This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate"--

What does it mean to be secure? In the global news, we hear stories daily about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about domestic-level conflicts around the world, about the challenges of cybersecurity and social security. This broad list highlights the fact that security is an idea with multiple meanings, but do we all experience security issues in the same way? In this book, Nicole Detraz explores the broad terrain of security studies through a gender lens. Assumptions about masculinity and femininity play important roles in how we understand and react to security threats. By examining issues of militarization, peacekeeping, terrorism, human security, and environmental security, the book considers how the gender-security nexus pushes us to ask different questions and broaden our sphere of analysis. Including gender in our analysis of security challenges the primacy of some traditional security concepts and shifts the focus to be more inclusive. Without a full understanding of the vulnerabilities and threats associated with security, we may miss opportunities to address pressing global problems. Our society often expects men and women to play different roles, and this is no less true in the realm of security. This book demonstrates that security debates exhibit gendered understandings of key concepts, and whilst these gendered assumptions may benefit specific people, they are often detrimental to others, particularly in the key realm of policy-making.

The author "explores the broad terrain of security studies through a gender lens ... By examining issues of militarization, peacekeeping, terrorism, human and environmental security, the book considers how the gender-security nexus pushes us to ask different questions and broaden our sphere of analysis. Including gender in our analysis of security challenges the primacy of traditional security concepts and shifts the focus to be more inclusive ... Our society often expects men and women to play different roles, and this is no less true in the realm of security. This book demonstrates that security debates exhibit gendered understanding of key concepts and, while these gendered assumptions may benefit specific people, they are often detrimental to others, particularly in the key realm of policymaking."--Page 4 of cover.

This article analyzes how climate change has been strategically linked to security issues in recent decades by a variety of actors. I begin by elaborating on two general discourses on the relationship between environment and security, which I call environmental conflict and environmental security. Using discourse analysis, I examine the particular ways that security and climate change have been linked by scholars, policymakers and the media. I then explore some of the potential implications that discussing climate change through each of these security discourses have for policy outcomes within the climate regime. I conclude that the environmental security discourse is the most useful for stressing vulnerabilities and the human security concerns linked to climate change.

What effect do social welfare policies have on women's active involvement in the economy and politics? Though there is much policy and scholarly debate on a wide spectrum of socioeconomic and political outcomes of welfare spending, little research has explored the possible impact that social welfare policies have on one of the supposed major beneficiaries of such policies—women. Combining data on welfare spending in three areas—social security, health, and education—with data on women's labor force participation and share of seats in national legislatures, this article examines the extent to which welfare spending might affect women's economic and political status. The results from a panel of 97 countries for the years spanning 1990 to 2010 indicate that the government's fiscal commitment to social policies is positively related to female participation in the total labor force and national politics. The findings are robust to different model specifications, sample selection, and the use of instrumental variables. One major policy implication of the findings is that the government's fiscal commitment to key social welfare areas are likely to contribute to women's economic and political empowerment, which might in turn help address gender imbalances in the economy and political sphere.

Climate change will negatively impact human communities and ecosystems, including driving increased food insecurity, increased exposure to disease, loss of livelihood and worsening poverty. Recent climate debates have focused attention on climate migrants, people who are displaced by the ecological stresses caused by climate change. To date, these debates have focused a great deal of attention on state security issues and have left the gender implications largely unexplored. In this article we examine the securitization of climate migration debates through gender lenses. We find that gender helps reveal and focus attention on the human security implications of climate migration and offers a useful discourse for climate policymaking. Adapted from the source document.