Evergreens conducted Armenia's first intersectional study on how climate change, environmental degradation, and security risks converge with gender inequality—producing a comprehensive baseline research report and a national policy guidebook to equip decision-makers with tools for change.

Armenia stands at a dangerous crossroads. Communities in the country's most vulnerable provinces face a compounding set of pressures simultaneously: territorial conflict and forced displacement, accelerating climate change, and the erosion of environmental resources that rural livelihoods depend on. Women bear a disproportionate share of these burdens—managing water, food systems, and household caregiving while facing structural barriers to land ownership, financial resources, and institutional decision-making. Yet for too long, these pressures had never been studied together, and almost never through a gender lens.

The Women, Peace & Environmental Security (WPES) initiative set out to change that. Implemented by Evergreens in partnership with Sustainable Progress NGO within the framework of IWPR's Building Resilience in the Eastern Neighborhood (BREN II) program and funded by UK International Development, the project ran from October 2025 to March 2026. It produced Armenia's first integrated evidence base on how climate change, environmental degradation, and security risks intersect with gender inequality—and translated that evidence into a national policy guidebook to equip decision-makers with practical tools for change.

The Challenge Armenia Faces

Armenia's climate is already shifting in measurable ways. National assessments document a temperature increase of approximately 1.2°C since 1929, alongside declining and increasingly variable precipitation. Projections indicate additional warming of up to 2.8°C by the 2050s, threatening water systems, agricultural productivity, and rural livelihoods. These pressures unfold alongside the lasting consequences of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the 2023 displacement of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians—communities that arrived in provinces already strained by water scarcity, land degradation, and weakened institutions.

Women in rural, border, and conflict-affected communities absorb the frontline consequences of these converging crises. They manage household water collection, agricultural labor, livestock care, food preparation, and caregiving responsibilities—often under worsening resource conditions and increasingly without male household members, as climate-driven economic stress accelerates male out-migration. Despite this central operational role, women are largely excluded from the land ownership, financial access, and institutional decision-making that determines how communities adapt.

Armenia's policy landscape has reflected this disconnect. The country's climate, gender, and security frameworks each contain meaningful commitments—but they have operated in parallel, rarely connected by shared data, coordinated institutions, or funded implementation. No policy instrument had yet operationalized the intersection of women, peace, and environmental security as an integrated, measurable whole. The WPES initiative was designed to fill that gap.

What We Set Out to Do

The WPES initiative pursued a clear objective: generate the evidence Armenia needs to build gender-responsive climate governance, and translate that evidence into actionable policy tools. The initiative ran from October 2025 to March 2026 across two phases. The first produced original mixed-methods baseline research across six regions of Armenia. The second translated the findings into structured advocacy, reaching the general public, civil society organizations, and government institutions through targeted outreach and the publication of a national policy guidebook. Both phases are now complete. The guidebook serves as both a strategic policy reference and a practical implementation tool for decision-makers at all levels.

A Rigorous Mixed-Methods Study Across Six Regions

Phase I of the initiative conducted a comprehensive baseline assessment across six regions of Armenia: Lori, Tavush, Syunik, Gegharkunik, Vayots Dzor, and Yerevan. These regions were selected for their exposure to climate risks, environmental stress, and proximity to conflict-affected areas—covering a spectrum from border communities to the capital.

The study combined three complementary data collection methods. A representative telephone survey reached 610 women across all six regions, providing a robust quantitative foundation on vulnerability, adaptive capacity, service accessibility, and institutional awareness. Four Focus Group Discussions—held in Syunik, Tavush, Lori, and Yerevan—captured the lived experiences and community-level perspectives of women in climate-affected and conflict-proximate areas. Twenty-seven Key Informant Interviews engaged a diverse range of stakeholders including government ministry representatives, healthcare professionals including gynecologists and public health specialists, environmental experts, Unified Social Service specialists, community social workers, and civil society leaders—providing the institutional depth and policy context needed to ground the findings in governance realities.

What the Data Revealed: Six Areas Where Climate, Gender, and Security Converge

The research reaches a central analytical conclusion: in Armenia, climate change does not create entirely new vulnerabilities—it amplifies pre-existing structural inequalities. Environmental hazards do not affect all populations equally. They intensify pre-existing disparities in health access, resource control, economic security, and institutional responsiveness, concentrating risk among those whose social and economic positions are already constrained. Across all regions studied, the findings converge on six interconnected dimensions.

Climate stress is reshaping women's health in ways that Armenia's health system is not yet equipped to address. Prolonged heatwaves disrupt blood pressure stability, metabolic processes, and reproductive health. Water degradation reduces access to essential microelements and accelerates bacterial growth, increasing household exposure for women who are primarily responsible for water collection and hygiene management. In mining-affected communities like Alaverdi and Kajaran, experts described elevated rates of hormonal disorders and chronic illness linked to heavy metal contamination moving through water sources, livestock, and local food chains. As one gynecologist from Yerevan State Medical University put it: \"Women are more sensitive to climate change because they have menstrual cycles closely linked to hormones. This is especially true for women with diabetes or hormonal disorders.\" Preventive healthcare utilization remains critically low despite free national screening programs—not due to a lack of information, but because economic pressure, caregiving burdens, and entrenched gender norms systematically push women to deprioritize their own health.

\"I don't have the right to get sick; the entire burden of the family is on me—bathing the children, doing the laundry, making bread.\"
— Woman, focus group participant, Syunik region

As drought, irregular precipitation, and groundwater depletion intensify, agricultural labor in rural communities is increasingly falling on women. Male out-migration—itself a climate-driven household coping strategy—consolidates responsibility for farming, livestock care, water management, and food production among women who simultaneously lack formal authority over land, credit, and strategic agricultural decisions. The research describes this as the feminisation of climate risk: adaptation burdens accumulate among those with the least structural power to shape outcomes. Women actively participate in climate-smart agriculture trainings and demonstrate strong openness to new practices—but translating that knowledge into action repeatedly runs into a wall of household authority.

\"Trainings are organized for women: we learn new approaches, but then a challenge arises when it comes to convincing our husbands that certain practices should be implemented this way. Persuading our husbands remains difficult.\"
— Woman, focus group participant, Tavush region

Disaster preparedness infrastructure is critically underdeveloped at the community level. Despite improvements in institutional response coordination—demonstrated during the 2024 Alaverdi flood—preventive systems remain weak and poorly embedded in routine community life. 99% of respondents reported receiving no government or NGO assistance following environmental shocks, relying entirely on family and community networks as their primary safety net. 61% had never received early-warning SMS messages, and 57% were unaware of early-warning systems entirely. Many respondents did not know the location of shelters, psychosocial support centers, or legal aid services in their own communities. The only emergency institution most could reliably locate was the police station—a finding that illustrates how emergency awareness remains narrowly security-oriented rather than resilience-oriented.

Women's participation in local environmental initiatives and community discussions has grown in recent years, and the survey data reflects this: many women report confidence in speaking publicly. Yet this participation does not translate into influence over strategic decisions. While 34.7% of respondents described household decision-making as joint, 41.4% agreed that men should have priority in decisions—revealing a persistent gap between procedural inclusion and substantive authority. The pattern is consistent across sectors. Women manage the day-to-day realities of climate adaptation in households and agricultural systems; the strategic decisions about land use, financial investment, and resource allocation remain concentrated elsewhere. As one expert observed: \"Women are more informed and active. They listen, ask questions, and make suggestions. Men often say, 'My father did it this way, so why should I change?'\"

Rising energy costs are pushing rural households toward wood and dung for heating and cooking, increasing indoor air pollution. Women, children, and elderly family members—who spend more time indoors—bear the greatest exposure to smoke and particulate matter and the associated respiratory and cardiovascular health risks. Renewable and energy-efficient solutions exist and have demonstrated tangible benefits for household resilience where implemented, but remain financially inaccessible to most rural women without targeted financing mechanisms.

Across Armenia's national frameworks, gender, climate, and security commitments exist in parallel but rarely converge. The Climate Law treats climate change as a technical and environmental matter with no reference to displacement, conflict, or security dynamics. The Gender Strategy frames environmental risks through a development and health lens only, with no connection to Armenia's post-conflict and displacement context. While the third National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325 (2025–2027) has made meaningful progress in integrating climate dimensions, no single policy instrument operationalizes the intersection of women, peace, and environmental security as an integrated, funded, and measurable whole. Gender indicators in agriculture, energy, and disaster risk strategies remain largely rhetorical—present on paper, but not backed by data, dedicated budgets, or measurable targets.

Our Published Outputs

The baseline research report, \"Women at the Forefront of Climate Risk: Structural Gaps and Governance Challenges in Armenia\" (March 2026), is Armenia's first comprehensive gender-disaggregated study of how climate stress, environmental degradation, and security dynamics intersect with women's lives across six regions.

The policy guidebook, \"Women, Peace and Security in the Face of Climate Change: Policy Guidebook for Armenia\" (March 2026), provides practical guidance for government officials, civil society organizations, and practitioners working at the intersection of climate change, gender equality, and peace and security. It translates research findings into actionable recommendations across health, agriculture, energy efficiency and renewable energy, disaster preparedness, and governance—grounded in Armenia's national frameworks and aligned with UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. The guidebook is designed to serve as both a strategic policy reference and a practical implementation tool.

Both publications are available in English and Armenian and can be accessed on our online Library, Publications section.

A Foundation for Gender-Responsive Climate Governance

The WPES initiative fills a critical evidence gap at a pivotal moment for Armenia. The baseline research and guidebook together provide decision-makers at national, regional, and local levels with the data and the roadmap to begin closing the structural disconnect between Armenia's climate, gender, and security governance. The findings are directly relevant to the implementation of Armenia's third National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325 (2025–2027), to the development of the forthcoming National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2025–2030), and to Armenia's preparations to host CBD COP17 in Yerevan in 2026—a moment that places Armenia's environmental governance record under international scrutiny.

The research also establishes a replicable methodology that can be extended to broader Eastern Europe, and other post-conflict states, navigating the same convergence of climate pressure, displacement, and governance fragility. By placing Armenia at the center of this evidence base, Evergreens is contributing to a regional conversation that has lacked the country-specific, gender-disaggregated data needed to move from aspiration to action.

Women across Armenia's rural, border, and conflict-affected regions have always been on the frontlines of climate risk. They manage water, sustain food systems, absorb displacement, and hold communities together—doing the work of climate adaptation without the authority to shape it. This project has documented that reality with the rigour it deserves and produced the tools to begin changing it. The evidence is now on the table. Armenia's climate governance cannot claim to be effective, inclusive, or just until it places these women—and their knowledge, their labour, and their leadership—at its centre.