Reimagining the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda: Climate Resilience and Women’s Peacebuilding in Lake Chad

As Lake Chad’s waters shrink and droughts intensify, pastoralists and farmers clash over the remaining oases. Amid this crisis, rural women – farmers, water-keepers, and mediators – hold the keys to peace. Reinforcing climate action in the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda can unlock their potential. This article explores how we might transform conflict into resilience in the Lake Chad Basin by empowering women in Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria with ecological training, resource-management roles, and full implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325.

Climate Stress and Conflict in the Lake Chad Basin

Lake Chad once spanned a vast basin across four countries, but today it is a shadow of its former self. Scientists estimate the lake has lost about 90% of its volume since the 1960s. The exposed lakebed has attracted waves of migrants, but also intensified competition over land, water, and fish. In the Sahel, temperatures are rising 1.5× faster than the global average and 80% of farmland is increasingly degraded. Dwindling rains have led to severe water shortages, prompting some villages to dig ponds to save water and fish.

These environmental pressures have spawned local conflicts. In late 2021, Cameroon’s Far North Region saw two deadly episodes of fighting between Choa-Arab herders and Mousgoum fishing/farming communities. A simple accident – a cow drowning in a Mousgoum waterhole – ignited months of violence. By the end of 2021, dozens were killed, 19 villages burned, tens of thousands fled their homes, while over 60,000 Cameroonians crossed into Chad. Observers note that these clashes, though framed as ethnic, were fundamentally about scarce resources. As one researcher explains, “in the face of scarce fertile land, fish and pastures, communities still rely on identity and ethnicity to exclude one another”. Similar trends are seen across the Lake Chad Basin: climate shocks (droughts, floods, and desertification) amplify rivalries between farmers, fishers and herders, often supercharging old grievances.

Beyond the immediate environmental pressures, climate vulnerability in the Lake Chad Basin is deeply shaped by long-standing gender inequalities. As highlighted in studies on women’s conditions in the Sahel, women in northern Cameroon and neighbouring regions often face restricted access to education, land, inheritance, and political representation. These structural constraints limit their adaptive capacity and magnify the effects of climate shocks.

In a context where girls leave school early, where women cannot inherit family land, and where patriarchal norms frame them as “secondary actors” in economic life, climate change becomes an additional multiplier of existing inequalities. Yet, paradoxically, these same women hold communities together through agricultural labour, informal trade, household management, and social cohesion roles. Their resilience – often invisible – underscores why any climate-security response in the Lake Chad Basin must place women at its centre.

Women as Stewards of Peace and the Environment

Women in the Lake Chad region bear the brunt of this climate-conflict nexus and can also be part of the solution. In rural Sahelian communities, women are the main collectors and guardians of water, responsible for fetching water and managing household food production. As water becomes scarce and farmland dries out, both workloads and vulnerabilities grow. Women suffer disproportionately when the lake shrinks or fails to flood fields on time. In addition, climate stress and conflict increase risks of gender-based violence, displacement and loss of livelihoods for women.

At the same time, women have long played key roles in local economy and conflict management. In many Lake Chad communities, women cultivate gardens and manage livestock on the household farm, giving them deep knowledge of the land and water cycle. Crucially, local women’s groups often act as grassroots peacemakers. In Chad, village “mothers’ groups” and women’s peace committees routinely mediate disputes over land, water, and cattle – exactly the resources at stake in climate-driven clashes. These women use traditional dialogue, reconciliation ceremonies, and kinship ties to defuse tensions between herders and farmers. A recent review of Chad’s first WPS National Action Plan highlights that “women-led local associations … often mediate disputes over land, water, and cattle – resources that frequently spark conflict”.

International experience reinforces this potential; when climate stress reshuffles gender roles, women often step into new positions of leadership. As a UN study notes, when men leave or shift tasks, “women take on greater responsibility for livelihood production”, creating “windows of opportunity” for them to be engaged in governance of natural resources and conflict resolution. In parts of Sudan, for instance, women have begun facilitating dialogue over water and land disputes – a role once reserved for men. They also carry unique ecological knowledge – knowing where waterholes lie, which soil furrows still yield grain, and how to preserve seeds against drought. Studies show that tapping women’s local knowledge, for example, storing seeds in high-ground granaries before floods, can strengthen climate adaptation.

In practice, women’s leadership is already emerging in the Lake Chad Basin. A cross-border conservation project (supported by Global Affairs Canada and others) explicitly puts women and youth “at the heart” of wetland restoration in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. The project offers training to women as environmental stewards and leaders, encouraging open dialogue and more equitable gender roles. The project’s goals include improving water access and biodiversity while easing tensions over natural resources through “environmental peacebuilding”. These initiatives demonstrate that when women are empowered to manage ecosystems, whole communities gain – food security rises and conflicts can be prevented.

Bridging Climate Change and the WPS Agenda

The global Women, Peace and Security framework (established through UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000) calls for women’s full participation in peace processes. It explicitly affirms that women are vital to addressing threats to security, including emerging ones. Yet in practice, WPS plans have largely overlooked climate change as a security issue. As one analysis finds, only about 1 in 4 national WPS action plans even mention climate. This is a missed opportunity: climate change is increasingly recognized as a security threat, driving instability through droughts, floods, forced displacement, and food shortages.

For the Lake Chad Basin, integrating climate into WPS is not abstract, it is urgent. The security risks of a drying climate (e.g. resource skirmishes, migration pressures, extremist recruitment) disproportionately hurt women and girls. At the same time, empowering women in climate solutions can reduce those risks. Georgetown’s Women, Peace and Security Index shows that countries where women have more rights and leadership are more peaceful and less vulnerable to climate shocks. In other words, advancing gender equality (a core WPS goal) goes hand-in-hand with building climate resilience. Although the WPS agenda offers a ready-made framework, there is a need for broader resolutions and national plans to address environmental security. States will therefore ensure that women effectively take the lead in climate adaptation and peacebuilding.

Recommendations: Empowering Women for Climate-Resilient Peace

To unlock this transformative potential, concrete steps are needed at international, regional and grassroots levels. Key recommendations include:

Scaling the WPS Agenda: Gendered Solutions for Climate-Driven Conflict

To effectively reimagine the WPS agenda, it is crucial to conceive of women not only as victims of climate insecurity but as essential actors in building peace and environmental resilience. The WPS framework offers a powerful yet underused toolkit for addressing these climate-induced security challenges.

First, national WPS action plans should explicitly integrate climate adaptation and green recovery as core pillars. For instance, Chad’s most recent plan (2023–2027) links women’s empowerment to conflict prevention and recognizes spillover risks from neighbouring countries. However, such strategies remain rare across the region. Expanding this climate-sensitive planning to other Lake Chad countries is essential, particularly by mainstreaming climate risk analysis into peace and security frameworks. Development donors and the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) could play a leading role by coordinating a regional stabilization strategy that links gender, environment, and peace.

Equally important is the full and funded implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and its sister resolutions. Governments must ensure women’s meaningful participation not only in formal peace talks but also in all aspects of natural resource governance and climate response. This includes allocating budgets for women-led initiatives, protecting women human rights defenders, and guaranteeing their roles in local peace committees and national dialogues. Civil society organizations should also be supported to monitor progress and promote accountability at all levels.

Beyond the WPS Agenda: Climate Resilience as a Pathway to Peace

While the WPS framework provides a strong entry point, a broader transformation is needed to link ecological restoration with peacebuilding. In the Lake Chad Basin, where livelihoods are closely tied to the environment, resilience strategies must recognize this interdependence.

Training programs in environmental restoration and climate-smart agriculture can empower women to lead both ecological and social recovery. Building on local knowledge, women can spearhead reforestation campaigns to rehabilitate degraded wetlands or introduce drought-resilient crops that stabilize food supplies. UNDP-backed initiatives already show that such interventions not only restore ecosystems but also reduce competition over land and resources – two major drivers of inter-community conflict.

At the same time, inclusive natural resource governance is essential. Women must be given formal roles in managing land, water, and grazing systems, whether through community resource committees or village councils. Chadian women’s associations have shown how female mediators can successfully resolve land and water disputes at the grassroots level. Recognizing and formalizing these roles could reduce the recurrence of violence while advancing gender equity.

Finally, lasting peace depends on well-resourced networks of women peacebuilders who work at the intersection of gender, environment, and security. Local groups – already active in areas impacted by violent extremism – should receive sustained support, including funding, training, and platforms for knowledge exchange. Whether through early warning systems, agroforestry cooperatives, or solar-powered irrigation projects, these women are already showing what a climate-resilient peace could look like.

Conclusion

The crises of climate change and insecurity in the Lake Chad Basin demand a reimagined approach. Rural women are not just victims of environmental decline, they are vital agents of peace and resilience. By integrating climate action into the Women, Peace and Security agenda, we can recognize and amplify women’s leadership in fields, forests, and lakeshores. Training women in environmental restoration, including them in resource governance, and fully implementing gender-sensitive peace frameworks (like UNSCR 1325) will empower communities to adapt together. In short, empowering African rural women is both a feminist imperative and a smart security strategy. Through these steps, the Lake Chad Basin can move from conflict to cooperation, guided by the ingenuity of its women farmers, water-keepers, and peacebuilders.