Taking Out the Trash: Tourism Waste, Women’s Environmental Insecurity, and the Foundations of Community Fragility in Coastal Asia-Pacific

Apr 14, 2026 | Maryruth Belsey Priebe
Environmental Peacebuilding Association

It’s August in Boracay, Philippines. The beach bars, restaurants and luxury resorts are packed with revellers and tourists — up to 2.1 million visiting in 2017 alone. Meanwhile, the island was producing 90 to 115 tonnes daily of solid waste despite the fact that local waste management systems can only process around 30 tonnes a day. Untreated sewage poured into the ocean, pushing the levels of coliform bacteria in the sea to an estimated 2.5 times the acceptable level. President Duterte then dubbed Boracay "a cesspool" in April 2018 and shut down the tourist resort for six months. 

One outcome that's rarely discussed in the news: the impact of the waste problem and Duterte's crackdown on the people who live on the island. The answer often runs along gendered lines, with the same pattern unfolding in most coastal tourist areas of Southeast Asia. Women in these communities, from Palawan to Bali, are the primary water collectors, and the managers of health problems when their water is unsafe to drink. They're the owners of the small family businesses — smallscale fisheries or food vending — that are increasingly being destroyed by the waste and pollution that neither they nor their governments control. Of course, men also suffer, in fact, one of the findings from recent water insecurity research shows that men's economic losses from the degradation of these resources can be immense. But women are hit in distinct ways. They carry the weight of providing clean water, the health consequences for their family and managing a household in a damaged environment — as well as the risks inherent in their informal sector livelihoods — more than men, according to WASH and gender evidence that's increasingly abundant. 

Tourism waste isn't simply an environmental issue but also a gendered problem of peacebuilding — with crucial implications for disaster resilience and conflict prevention. Contaminated drinking water, unhygienic housing and declining livelihoods from environmental pollution–these environmental security issues faced by coastal tourism workers in places like Bali and Palawan will have already eroded their household resilience long before any crisis such as an approaching typhoon hits. The result is gendered environmental pre-crisis conditions that compromise stability in ways that leave individuals and communities much less able to withstand or recover from repeated shocks. 

The idea of environmental gendered pre-crisis conditions builds on several academic traditions. The concept of human security was introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 1994 Human Development Report and offers a broader understanding of security beyond the traditional state-centric view. It comprises seven threats to human life: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political. The inclusion of environmental security is crucial because when these basics aren't secure, other elements of human security also break down. However, the 1994 Human Development Report doesn’t articulate what happens when an economy dumps the externalities of things like tourism onto the local populations who live there. 

Environmental peacebuilding-scholars including Conca and Dabelko and later — and later expanded on by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) — begins to fill the gap. It examines resource degradation and its propensity to fuel conflict and how resource governance can contribute to peacebuilding and cooperation. This scholarship points out that roughly 40% of civil conflicts worldwide since World War II are linked to natural resources. 

Yet, the discourse around environmental peacebuilding hasn't been as quick to adopt a gendered perspective. Specifically, how does environmental degradation concentrate on specific populations and communities and what impact does it have on families and communities? Feminist political ecology, work pioneered by academics such as Babette Resurrección at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) for over a decade, shows that the stresses and burdens of environmental damage don't fall equally on people. Such degradation often magnifies existing inequalities based on gender, class, and ethnicity. For example, within coastal tourism economies throughout Southeast Asia, women comprise waste-picking economies in areas of Palawan and often work in unsanitary conditions or make their living close to or even within local landfill dump sites. 

This piece brings gender-sensitive considerations into the fragility debate by arguing that chronic environmental insecurity that primarily imapcts women's capacity to manage household provisioning, protect families, and organize their communities precedes any acute crises. Building on Thomas Homer-Dixon's work on environmental scarcity and violence, as well as that of Wisner et al. on disaster risk reduction that identifies the root causes and precursors to disaster, and the fragility research conducted by organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on pre-crisis conditions determines the level of community resilience to future acute shocks. These aren't crisis triggers, they determine the extent and duration of damage when crises occur. If we need communities to recover from natural disasters and be resistant to conflict, we must ask who bears the burden of processing an excessive amount of trash and the cost it imposes on them.

How Tourism Waste Becomes a Gendered Burden

Tourism economies face inherent waste management problems, extending far beyond insufficient infrastructure. The tourism development model is based on externalizing waste and pollution to host populations while reaping financial profits and sending the proceeds overseas. Communities are then left to contend with solid waste, wastewater, dwindling groundwater supplies, damaged mangrove ecosystems, and beach erosion. This isn't an unintended consequence but a result of deliberately engineered economic models.

Boracay's extensive clean-up operation provides is a great example of this. Before its six-month closure in 2018, approximately 85% of businesses on the island employed illicit sewage systems, discharging untreated wastewater directly into the ocean. Between 1998 and 2018, the coral cover on Boracay experienced a decline of 70.5% as the number of tourist visitors escalated. Local residents and business owners had repeatedly voiced concerns and requested waste infrastructure development over the years but were consistently overlooked. The environmental degradation wasn't a sudden event but the cumulative result of decades of externalized decisions. The women who fished, foraged, and sold food from the depleted marine environments endured the consequences long before President Duterte ordered the island's shutdown.

A similar pattern unfolds in Bali on a larger scale. Between 1988 and 2013, water demand saw a remarkable surge of 295%. Tourists consume on average three to four times more water than local Balinese residents. Presently, 65% of Bali's freshwater supply is allocated to the tourism industry. This imbalance has led to a crisis that has dried up approximately half the island's rivers. Mismanaged tourism waste has resulted in groundwater contamination, making tap water unsafe for consumption across much of the island. Only a mere 3% of Bali's total wastewater undergoes treatment. The Suwung treatment plant functions well below its capacity, consequently, the majority of wastewater flows into rivers, rice paddies, and coastal areas where women fish, cultivate food and collect water for their households.

The physical implications of this burden add up. While groundwater contamination is most noticeable due to its human health impacts, the accumulation of marine plastic presents another serious concern for women whose livelihoods, tied to beach tourism, are severely affected. Post-harvest activities in fisheries, such as gleaning, shellfish processing and other associated tasks, represent some of the most exposed professions to plastic pollution; these tasks are predominantly performed by women across Southeast Asia. Plastic pollution doesn't only diminish fisheries revenues by millions of dollars annually, its cleanup is largely borne by communities in the Global South.

Why women? The answer is care work. Women and girls are responsible for fetching water for domestic use in an estimated 80% of households in developing countries lacking access to piped water. Therefore, it's women who must travel further when local water sources become tainted, who must decide between using dubious water or going without, and who bear the burden of illness when waterborne diseases strike the household.

Meanwhile, women's economic assets are especially vulnerable. In coastal tourism communities, women are overwhelmingly concentrated in the informal sector, engaged in activities such as fish vending, small food services, handicraft production, and smallscale subsistence farming in coastal areas. Research from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on the Pacific region indicates that over nine out of every ten women-owned businesses are informal and that women constitute 54% of the tourism workforce, predominantly occupying low-paid, informal positions. When pollution ruins the fishing grounds and rice fields they depend on, there's no safety net. When the tourist economy contracts, as it did dramatically when Boracay closed in 2018 displacing more than 30,000 locals, women's livelihoods are disproportionately hit the hardest — a fact confirmed by the ADB which documented that women represented 67% of job losses in the tourism sector in Sri Lanka during the COVID-induced economic downturn.

Furthermore, women in coastal communities have limited access to the governance structures that make waste management decisions. In coastal Philippines, the gender division impedes resource access and reduces women's participation in the planning of fisheries and infrastructure development, as observed by Torell and colleagues in their analysis of Philippine fishing communities. The communities most affected by the externalization of tourism waste are precisely those with the least power to address it.

From Women's Insecurity to Community Fragility

This issue has far-reaching consequences, extending beyond individual health and economic wellbeing. Environmental insecurity leads to community vulnerability even before typhoons or floods strike. UN Women and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) have mapped this dynamic across Asia and the Pacific, demonstrating how environmental stress leads to household food insecurity, loss of assets, and diminished decision-making power for women, ultimately undermining adaptability at all levels. Four interconnected pathways are worth examining.

Disaster Response Failure

Women aren't merely passive victims of disasters. Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, they're consistently recognized as crucial responders, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the Philippines referring to women as "first responders at household level". For instance, women-led organizations, such as the Kakasa network in Eastern Samar, played a vital role in the coordination of recovery efforts after Super Typhoon Haiyan. This capacity isn't peripheral but central.

However, the effectiveness of women's groups is contingent on pre-existing wellbeing and agency, which is precisely what chronic environmental insecurity undermines. When women already struggle with contaminated water, ongoing health problems, and degraded livelihoods, their ability to respond to disasters is compromised long before any storm arrives. UN Women's WRD (Women's Rights and Development) Knowledge Hub highlights how unpaid care burdens and restricted mobility hinder disaster preparedness. UNDP's analysis corroborates that caregiving responsibilities limit women's involvement in preparedness activities. Research conducted across Asia reveals that women may be prevented from receiving early warnings simply because they don't participate in the social spaces where such information is shared. Caregiving duties further increase women's vulnerability through limited mobility and cultural expectations that women require male permission to evacuate, adding an extra layer of risk for both women and children.

Consequently, when a typhoon strikes these environmentally insecure women, they may have fewer reserves-physical, financial or informational- to absorb the initial shock. When these communities face a typhoon, women already burdened by environmental insecurity have diminished reserves -physical, economic, informational — to draw on. The disaster hits harder.

Recovery starts from a lower baseline. And the communities that depend on women's coordination capacity to navigate crises find themselves dangerously exposed.

Recovery Stall

Post-disaster recovery in the Asia-Pacific is gendered in its outcomes. According to the ADB, gender inequalities often deepen post-disaster, as women face gender-specific barriers to aid programs during rebuilding, such as a lack of land titles, no banking history, and non-inclusion in formal recovery programs. These risks existed well before the disaster itself. If the status quo before a typhoon hits involves precarious water infrastructure, insecure livelihoods, and degraded community health, then the process of recovery will stall in specific and predictable ways.

When pre-disaster conditions involve contaminated water sources, eroded livelihoods, and reduced health standards, recovery is stalled in specific, predictable ways. Women who have been managing contaminated water sources before typhoons are likely managing them after the disaster from an even more degraded infrastructure with even less formal support, according to the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction’s (GFDRR's) research on gender in disaster recovery. Rather than remedying the insecurity of the environmental conditions, the disaster response amplifies them. In fact, only three out of 17 post-disaster assessments conducted in Asia between 2005 and 2015 produced adequate gendered analysis, meaning that the gender dimensions of recovery — including those that involve environmental impacts — are rendered invisible to the agents tasked with addressing the recovery process.

Resource Competition and Non-State Actors

Does environmental stress cause civil conflict? While the relationship between scarcity, conflict, and bad governance is contested in the field of environmental peacebuilding, some scholars have written convincingly that "resource scarcity leads to violent conflict" narratives have several obvious flaws. These critiques are well-made, but the general pattern of conflict is as follows: in weakened states with unresolved grievances and increasingly unequal access to resources, non-state actors have more opportunities to exploit the local population. Since 2000, the Pacific Institute has begun recording cases of water-related conflict across the world. In its database, there are now over 1,300 recorded conflicts. The pathway is fairly clear: if populations in at-risk areas can't secure adequate access to clean water, farmland, and other environmental services from their state, they become increasingly susceptible to non-state groups that promise the same services through alternative means. This mechanism is often at play in vulnerable locations, and a reason why ISIS was able to recruit individuals to engage in clan warfare in certain regions.

In coastal tourism communities where a practice of waste externalization has created degrading water and livelihood resources, such mechanisms are in latent normal periods and acute after disasters. As women's capacities to supply for their own households are weakened and their capacity to maintain the social networks through which communities coordinate action is diminished, spaces open up to be predictably exploited. A vast literature on post-conflict and post-disaster communities demonstrates that gender-based violence rises in the absence of safe spaces and women's economic vulnerability during a crisis is directly associated with exploitation by organized groups offering alternatives to legitimate but destroyed livelihood options.

Social Fragmentation

This aspect of the post-disaster environmental and security cascade is likely the hardest to quantify. However, this aspect is probably the most important to identify: the erosion of the community's capacity for collective action. In fact, according to UN Women's Asia-Pacific research, the social networks composed of women — such as cooperatives, neighborhood associations and the informal networks of mutual aid that allow communities to function on a day-to-day basis — are community resilience itself, not just a "nice-to-have. " Typhoon Haiyan is one of the Philippines' best-known disasters due to its level of destruction. What enters the conversation less often is how women-led people's organizations spearheaded relief efforts after the storm subsided, offering cash for work and rebuilding social ties for communities devastated by Typhoon Haiyan.

However, when women must spend their days dealing with the environmental burden of their day-to-day existence-hours attempting to find clean water, managing illness, or rebuilding destroyed livelihoods — these community networks become less resilient. Time and energy resources are limited. Work by SEI and UNDP tracing the hidden environmental burdens — unpaid care work that predominantly falls on women — shows the hollowing out of the ties of community resilience over time. This is the most upstream version of the entire scenario, which isn't a spectacular failure of disaster response but rather the quieter destruction of what holds communities together before disasters ever take place.

Policy Implications

As a growing volume of evidence from both Boracay and Bali and the broader Asia-Pacific suggests, we need policy recommendations across domains to address these challenges.

First, waste governance needs to be reconceptualized as Women, Peace and Security (WPS) infrastructure. The WPS agenda is doing valuable work in bringing women into security and conflict prevention structures. However, this agenda has been far slower to integrate women's security concerns about the environment. For example, in 2020, SIPRI found 17 mentions of climate change in 80 National Action Plans for security, almost all confined to narrative prose and without concrete programmatic actions, environmental governance (including waste) was almost entirely missing. In contrast, WPS national action plans generally focus on peace processes and largely ignore the environmental insecurities that erode women's agency and community resilience well before formal violence or disaster ever arrives. Bringing environmental governance, including waste management in tourism economies, within the purview of the WPS frameworks would therefore be a valuable expansion of the WPS framework.

Second, industry-specific accountability measures for tourism must now include community waste burdens in their architecture. Today, sustainable tourism certifications and environmental impact assessments tend to measure the direct environmental impact of tourism-carbon emissions, waste volumes or water use — without asking who bears the brunt of the costs when those environmental targets fall short. Collectivity and correct disposal of tourism waste is one of many tools for operationalizing women's environmental security. In this realm, the underused tool of gender-responsive environmental impact assessment would involve answering the question of who bears the impact of unconstrained tourism development and what effect these impacts have on community safety across the region.

Third, disaster risk reduction (DRR) programs must view environmental insecurity as a gendered, systematic predictor of resilience. Plan International found that resilience scores were cut in half when data was disaggregated by gender in Manila and Navotas — after identifying the specific vulnerabilities women face, resilience measurements plunged. This shouldn't deter gender analysis in disaster resilience; it should inform the need for a far more granular and nuanced measurement, understanding environmental degradation as an upstream and critical predictor of resilience.

Who Takes Out the Trash?

This question is posed bluntly at the outset of this article. Who takes out the trash? Across the coastal tourism towns in the Asia-Pacific region, it's women. These women are forced to absorb the costs of weak sanitation infrastructure into their bodies, their homes, their earnings, and their communities. Waste and its implications extend beyond mere environmental concerns, they constitute a profound human and community security issue. Failure to recognize the link renders nearly all aspects of the disaster crisis out of view.

Tourism pollution fosters chronic inequalities that are based on gender — in women's capabilities, safety and time — which leads to pre-disaster conditions that leave communities vulnerable and less resilient to acute shocks. The disaster literature in Asia and the Pacific is full of cascades from environmental insecurity to disaster response, recovery, resource competition and conflict. Few disaster analyses attempt to trace these cascades back to their root causes in the environment. Therefore, by connecting the dots between environmental degradation and conflict, environmental peacebuilding, feminist political ecology, and human security clearly show that community resilience can't be achieved without considering the environmental insecurity of women. This points to a clear policy implication: waste governance, specifically that relating to waste externalization in tourism economies, offers a powerful but underutilized opening for WPS programs, DRR initiatives, and regional security collaboration.

In many areas, Boracay's beaches are once again pristine. The question is whether the communities behind those beaches have recovered — and, importantly, whether the women who absorbed the costs of that collapse have also recovered.