How women are strengthening community resilience as Armenia confronts climate change.

THE BIG PICTURE

As Yerevan prepares to welcome more than 20,000 delegates from all 196 UN member states to a major biodiversity summit, women in Armenia are being increasingly recognised as key to tackling the environmental challenges facing the country.

Their role is gaining new significance as, for the first time, Armenia recognises climate change as an emerging security challenge alongside conflict and cyber threat.

VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE

“Our research shows that women in Armenia manage the systems through which climate change is actually experienced – water, food, health, household energy – yet they hold disproportionately little authority over the strategic decisions that determine adaptation,” explained Van Arakelyan, the founder and CEO of the environmental Evergreens NGO.

“When resilience planning excludes them, it excludes the people with the most granular knowledge of what is failing and why. This is not only an equity argument; it is an effectiveness argument.”

The October 19-30 meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in Yerevan will highlight Armenia’s status as a designated global biodiversity hotspot, home to roughly 60 per cent of in the South Caucasus’ flora and fauna.

But it will also stress the dangers Armenia faces as a landlocked, mountainous nation threatened by rising temperatures, desertification and water scarcity, as well as conflict and displacement.

Arakelyan argued that tailored strategies were needed to face these challenges.

“We found that women are consistently more open to adaptive innovation, but the diffusion of that innovation stalls at the household and institutional level because norms, not knowledge, are the binding constraint. Climate policy that ignores this will keep producing unchanged outcomes.”

WHY IT MATTERS

Women in Armenia are often the first to experience the impacts of water scarcity, food insecurity and displacement, yet a growing body of evidence shows that they are also central to community adaptation and resilience.

Supported by IWPR, an Evergreens six-month national study has produced Armenia’s first policy guidebook on how climate change and security intersects with gender inequality, equipping decision-makers with practical tools for change.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Climate change is not gender neutral. Water scarcity and extreme weather are reshaping daily life, often placing the greatest burden on women and girls and amplifying existing inequalities.

Whether in Afghanistan, where drought has intensified the challenges faced by women living under Taliban restrictions, or in parts of rural Kenya, where women are exposed to heightened risks of violence during long daily searches for water, IWPR reporting continues to highlight these challenges.

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/armenian-women-can-shape-greener-future