Global Warming, War, and Gender-Based Violence—What’s the Connection?
9/6/25, 4:00 PM
Recent data from U.N Women indicate that economic crises, conflicts, and climate change are intensifying gender-based violence.
When people think about intimate partner violence (IPV), or domestic violence (DV), there can be a tendency to think of these issues as individual, relationship-based struggles that simply occur on a mass scale. However, new data from U.N. Women indicate that gender-based violence is strongly correlated with global environmental crises, such as climate change, earthquakes and droughts, with underserved women facing disproportionate and multiple forms of intersecting discrimination.
According to U.N. women, “Climate change and environmental degradation increase the risks of violence against women and girls due to displacement, resource scarcity and food insecurity, and disruption to services for survivors.” In fact, an estimated 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women. Examples of this include the significant increase in rapes after Hurricane Katrina; an increase in domestic violence post-earthquake in Canterbury, New Zealand; and an increase in human trafficking a year after the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.
When it comes to war and conflict-affected areas, the correlation is also very strong. As U.N Women points out, child marriage rates are 4 percentage points higher in conflict-affected areas, while 8 percent of women in camps in Haiti reported that they had turned to sex work/prostitution for survival at least once. Women who were displaced in Colombia and Liberia were also at a significantly greater risk of experiencing intimate-partner violence in the past year compared to non-displaced women.
While combatting climate change and advocating for peace, it’s important that gender-based violence be understood and considered, and that we continually advocate for women who are disproportionally victims and survivors. For more information, check out: