When the Smoke Clears: How Hybrid Warfare Exploits Gender Vulnerabilities in Climate Disasters

Jan 14, 2026 | Maryruth Belsey Priebe
Environmental Peacebuilding Association

The hurricane passes. The wildfire is contained. The flood waters recede. Then the real fight begins.

We are beginning to understand how the vulnerabilities exposed in the wake of climate disasters create openings for opportunity and exploitation. We know that the security sector is taking much more seriously the threat of “hybrid warfare”—integrative tactics that combine conventional military force, cyber operations, mis/disinformation, economic coercion, and proxy forces to achieve political aims without triggering full-scale armed conflict. Hybrid operations are usually waged in what strategists have termed the “grey zone”—the contested space between peace and war, where an aggressor can advance his or her interests with some degree of plausible deniability. We are starting to recognize how multi-domain hybrid operations are increasingly sophisticated efforts to influence target populations, and manipulate, distract, or disorient decision-makers. But what we're missing is a critical dimension: whether or not these tactics affect women and men the same.  

What do hybrid tactics actually look like? These are actions for which it is difficult to identify overt military action - there are no tanks rolling over borders or missiles being fired. Instead, these might be cyberattacks on critical infrastructure during the phase of recovery and reconstruction. Or disinformation campaigns that seek to take advantage of turmoil and social vulnerability to erode confidence in institutions. They could include organized crime networks staking their claim along displacement routes. Or perhaps these are armed groups that take advantage of the scarcity of resources to mask their own territorial aggrandizement. These are also economic pressures using the control of assistance flows or reconstruction contracts as levers of coercion. The important thing is that they all seek to make political, economic or territorial gains, without setting off the alarm that would be triggered by a traditional military aggression. They thrive in the grey area in which intent is difficult to prove, attributions of responsibility are difficult, and any collective response becomes extremely challenging.

So what does this have to do with gender? Well, this isn't about women being inherently vulnerable. It's about how existing gender inequalities become force multipliers for bad actors - state and non-state alike - who see disaster zones as theaters for operations that fall below the threshold of conventional conflict. If 80% of climate-displaced people are women, and research shows trafficking networks systematically exploit climate disasters to target displaced women and girls; if globally women are less than 15% of landholders, and land grabs following environmental degradation systematically dispossess women - these are not just interesting facts about the distribution of rights, resources, and representation. They are facts about vulnerabilities that have been targeted, dependencies that have been weaponized, and systems that have been broken.

We need a way to understand the patterns of how hybrid warfare and gender intersect in the context of climate disasters. This author examined past real-world climate-related hybrid threat scenarios (e.g. disinformation campaigns in the Philippines that exploited chaos in the aftermath of disaster, and armed groups in the Sahel using drought as a pretext for territorial expansion); as well as documented hypothetical scenarios from security planning exercises and academic literature—and found six distinct patterns, described below. 

1. Deliberate Gender Targeting - When tactics intentionally exploit or attack women
2. Structural Gender Exploitation - Leveraging existing inequalities without explicit targeting
3. Gendered Resilience Undermining - Preventing women's recovery and participation
4. Women as Actors - Women's roles as perpetrators or participants (under-researched)
5. Protective & Resilience Factors - Where gender provides advantages (the counter-narrative)
6. Research Gaps - What we don't know but desperately need to

This matters: climate disasters are accelerating, hybrid tactics are proliferating, and Women, Peace and Security frameworks haven't caught up to this particular intersection.

Each pattern gets explored in detail in what follows.

Pattern 1: Deliberate Gender Targeting

Some hybrid tactics don't just affect women disproportionately - they deliberately target them. In the chaos following disasters, hybrid actors move quickly to consolidate power and eliminate opposition. Local leaders who might organize resistance get threatened or disappear. Journalists documenting abuses face intimidation. Community organizers trying to coordinate relief find themselves targets. This isn't random violence - it's calculated suppression of anyone who might challenge the new power dynamics emerging from the crisis.

But when we look closely at who gets targeted and how, some gender patterns emerge.

Information warfare provides the clearest examples. If women climate scientists and activists raise their voices about the climate causes of disasters, they are likely to be the targets of coordinated campaigns to silence them. A member of Congress called climate lawyer Raya Salter “boo.” Canada’s former Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna, was “Climate Barbie.” Greta Thunberg has been called “mentally ill” perhaps hundreds of times. As state-aligned actors work to undermine and distract the climate conversation, they know it is an effective strategy to attack women’s credibility. Campaigns against women work because they exploit existing sexism - the idea that women are "too emotional" for science, "too weak" for leadership, "too radical" to be taken seriously.

Researchers documented over 1,500 online attacks per month against women environmental defenders across just five countries at the end of 2025. While men may experience higher rates of online harassment, women face qualitatively different attacks that are sexualized, gendered, and cause significant emotional distress and silencing effects. 

Physical violence follows a similar pattern. While men make up the vast majority of environmental defenders killed, nearly 9 in 10 lethal attacks, that tells only part of the story. In Mexico and Central America, 1,698 acts of violence were committed against women environmental defenders between 2016-2019 - including displacement, repression, criminalization, and violent targeting. In Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, when women defenders are killed, two-thirds are Indigenous women. The violence women face is also qualitatively different: research shows women defenders face retaliation specifically because their activism defies gender expectations - they're targeted not just for standing up against environmental destruction, but for being women who refuse to stay quiet. Sexual violence, gendered threats, attacks on their credibility as women - these aren't random.

And then there's trafficking. Climate displacement doesn't just create refugees - it creates opportunities. Criminal networks understand that 80% of climate-displaced people are women, that women and girls on migration routes are vulnerable, that breakdown of social stability enables violations. The incidence of human trafficking increases following natural disasters. In Uganda, droughts directly correlated with sexual exploitation for basic goods.

Following crises, there is often deliberate exploitation. Bad actors see climate disasters and think: opportunity.

Pattern 2: Structural Gender Exploitation

Not all exploitation requires explicit targeting. Sometimes hybrid operations exploit existing inequalities without anyone needing to plan for it.

Adversaries understand that destroying critical infrastructure creates cascading failures that weaken resistance and increase dependency. A cyberattack on electrical grids doesn't just turn off lights - it shuts down hospitals, water treatment, communications. Blocking supply chains doesn't just create shortages - it forces populations to rely on whoever controls the flow of goods. Contaminating water sources doesn't just cause disease - it makes communities vulnerable to whoever can provide clean water. The goal is creating conditions where populations can't organize, can't resist, can't recover without outside intervention.

But these tactics land differently depending on who you are. The systems themselves are gendered - and that means women bear disproportionate costs even when they're not the explicit target.

Take attacks on healthcare systems. When ransomware hits hospitals or pandemics sap medical capacity, the burden falls heaviest on women - the 70% of health care workers who are women. During COVID-19, 72% of infections among health care workers in the Americas were women. These same women were also responsible for 80% of household chores while working the frontlines.

The 2024 Change Healthcare ransomware attack disrupted operations in all 50 U.S. states and territories, impacting the billing for 1 out of 3 patient records. Women absorbed much of the crisis. Women seeking maternal care. Women as primary caregivers for sick family members. Women making up the majority of the workforce scrambling to maintain patient care without functioning systems.

Infrastructure attacks work the same way. When power grids fail after disasters, women often deal with more of the consequences. Women do more unpaid care work than men. In Europe, 85% of single-parent households are led by women - they're hit hardest by energy crises. Blackouts mean additional hours taking care of the basics - for some, buying and prepping food, for others, gathering water and firewood and managing children in the dark. Research indicates that women as household caregivers are less mobile and spend more time at home during blackouts. Single mothers face the worst of it - financial strain plus sole responsibility for keeping households functioning.

Deforestation operates through similar mechanisms. 2.4 billion people use wood-based energy for cooking, and it's overwhelmingly women collecting that firewood. When forests are cleared - whether by criminal logging operations or state-sanctioned extraction (both of which may increase following a disaster) - women feel the impacts most acutely. They're the ones walking farther for fuel, spending more hours on collection, losing access to the non-timber forest products that supplement household food and income.

The pattern is clear: adversaries don't need to target women explicitly. The gendered structure of societies does that work for them.

Pattern 3: Undermining Gendered Resilience 

Some tactics specifically prevent women from recovering or adapting after disasters.

Preventing recovery is often more effective than initial destruction. Adversaries know this. Contaminate agricultural land with unexploded ordnance and communities can't farm for generations. Block reconstruction materials and populations remain displaced. Target the infrastructure of daily life - wells, granaries, community spaces - and you ensure people can't rebuild the social fabric that enables resistance. The strategy is creating permanent vulnerability.

But recovery isn't gender-neutral. When recovery pathways are blocked, those that are blocked often specifically block women's pathways to recovery.

Landmines in agricultural areas provide a stark example. Women aren't just farmers - they're often responsible for subsistence farming that feeds families. Research from Yemen shows women are more vulnerable to landmines in areas used for subsistence farming because they spend more time in fields, collecting firewood and water. Their mobility patterns differ from men's - they're more likely to be on paths to water sources, in areas close to home where they cultivate vegetables, in forests gathering fuel. When these areas are mined, women can't adapt. They can't easily shift to different land. Their recovery is blocked.

The same dynamic plays out in forest governance. When REDD+ initiatives or commercial forestry projects restrict community forest use, who loses? Women who depend on forests for household subsistence. Women who gather leaves for medicine, fruits for food, materials for cooking fuel. Research on community forestry in Nepal shows that policies and user‑group rules often frame poor and women’s forest‑dependent livelihoods as pressures on the forest, limiting their access and voice in governing forests they have used and managed for generations. As a result, conservation can also undermine women’s resilience.

Disaster planning itself often excludes women. Studies show gender is the most important predictor of individual disaster preparedness, yet women remain weakly represented in flood-planning and disaster decision-making. When women are excluded from planning, the plans don't account for their needs - which means they can't prepare, can't adapt, can't recover as effectively.

And when crises overlap, the compounding is brutal. Research on healthcare workers shows women unable to recover between successive emergencies - higher exposure in one crisis becomes higher vulnerability in the next. The system breaks them down crisis by crisis.

Pattern 4: Women as Actors

Crisis creates recruitment opportunities. Armed groups and criminal networks know that economic desperation, family pressure, and lack of alternatives make people - particularly young people - vulnerable to recruitment. Some join because they believe the cause. Others because they need to eat. Still others because refusing means death. During the chaos of disaster response, these recruitment efforts intensify. Militias offer protection. Gangs offer income. Extremist groups offer purpose. The recruitment pipelines that feed hybrid operations flow strongest when social structures collapse.

We assume men get recruited as fighters and women get victimized. But the reality is messier. The victimization narrative is strong. Women as targets, women as vulnerable, women bearing disproportionate impacts. All true. But incomplete.

Women participate in grey zone operations too. A comprehensive 2020 study on wildlife trafficking in Africa identified 6 primary roles and 31 secondary roles for women in trafficking networks. Women as hunters. Women as transporters. Women as sellers. Women as recruiters. The research reveals how little we know - most literature on wildlife trafficking ignores gender entirely, and when it does examine women's roles, it finds complexity we haven't accounted for. Gender inequality creates conditions for sex trafficking and exploitation integral to illegal wildlife trade - but it also creates pathways for women into criminal networks as actors, not just victims.

What is lacking is evidence of women exploiting disasters politically through opportunistic power grabs, crisis manipulation, disaster capitalism. The gaps here tell us something important: we've constructed such a strong narrative of women-as-victims that we're missing women-as-actors, both positive and negative.

Pattern 5: Protective & Resilience Factors (The Overlooked Story)

As already mentioned, not everything about gender in disaster contexts is vulnerability. Sometimes it's strength.

Communities don't just suffer hybrid operations passively. They organize. Neighborhood watch systems emerge to protect against looters and predators. Informal information networks warn of approaching threats. Community-based early warning systems develop from shared observations. Mutual aid networks share scarce resources. These aren't formal resistance movements - they're the everyday protective mechanisms that communities develop when formal systems fail. They're what keeps populations alive and functioning when everything else has broken down.

Women play central but often invisible roles in these protective mechanisms.

Women possess traditional ecological knowledge from their roles in fisheries, forestry, agriculture - knowledge developed over generations about environmental changes and adaptation strategies. When women fisherfolk on the Guinea-Liberia border creatively resolved a decades-long fishery conflict, they drew on this knowledge and collaborative approaches.

Women's community networks often provide resilience. During disasters, informal networks of women sharing resources, information, childcare - these become survival mechanisms. But we rarely study them systematically, rarely integrate them into formal response structures.

And women's crisis management approaches may differ in ways we haven't fully explored. Do women leaders make different decisions about resource allocation? Do they prioritize different vulnerabilities? Do they build different coalition structures? We don't know because we haven't studied it rigorously in disaster contexts.

This is the counter-narrative we need to do more to develop: not just how gender creates vulnerability, but how it creates action and resilience. Not just what women endure, but what they enable.

Pattern 6: Research Gaps 

Here's what is most worrisome - not what we found, but what we didn't.

Hybrid tactics are evolving faster than our ability to understand them. AI-generated deepfakes spread disinformation during emergencies when verification is impossible. Weaponized migration uses human suffering as a political tool. Deliberate environmental destruction - destroying dams, contaminating water, burning forests - creates "natural" disasters that provide cover for other operations. Sophisticated actors coordinate cyber attacks, physical infrastructure sabotage, and information operations in ways that compound chaos and obscure attribution. The playbook is getting more complex, more integrated, more devastating.

But we're asking almost no questions about how these emerging tactics affect women differently than men.

Technical military operations with environmental consequences appear gender-neutral, but are they? GPS jamming, drone operations, shadow fleet tactics, airspace violations - we found no research examining whether these have gender-differentiated impacts. 

Border closures create cascades, but how are they gendered? We found almost nothing on how border closures during or after climate disasters affect women differently. Do women get stuck more often? Face different exploitation risks? Have less access to smuggling networks that might help men cross?

The disinformation-to-trafficking pipeline needs investigation. We know disinformation campaigns target women. We know trafficking increases after disasters. But are these connected? Do disinformation efforts deliberately funnel vulnerable populations toward trafficking? Likely yes, but proof is needed.

Women’s and men’s roles in corruption and illegitimacy remain understudied. While our understanding of the gendered impacts of corruption is supported by research, we don’t know how women and men engage in corruption or illegitimacy. Are women leaders' actions questioned more readily during crises? Do they face different legitimacy challenges? Are they more or less likely to provide mutual aid? The political science exists on peacetime governance, but crisis contexts are different.For women fisherfolk, there is excellent recent research (2024-2025 studies) showing how climate change affects the 47% of fishing workers who are women. Women in fishing communities typically work in processing, trading, and selling fish rather than deep-sea fishing - roles that depend on consistent local catches and functioning market systems. When coral reef loss or overfishing disrupts fish populations and coastal ecosystems, women lose their livelihoods while having less access to alternative employment, credit, or the boats and equipment needed to fish farther offshore. This type of environmental destruction created by deliberate terraforming disproportionately hurts women whose livelihoods depend on healthy marine ecosystems and who lack the resources to adapt. But we need more on how these impacts could be weaponized.

These gaps aren't academic curiosities. They're gaps that bad actors can exploit.

Why Understanding Gendered Post-Disaster Hybrid Threats Matters

Hybrid operations are becoming more sophisticated and more coordinated. We're seeing cyber attacks timed to coincide with physical infrastructure sabotage. Disinformation campaigns that prepare the ground for political manipulation. What used to be distinct categories - warfare, crime, natural disaster - now blur together in ways that make traditional response frameworks inadequate.

And in all these evolving tactics, gender remains an analytical, policy, and operational gap.

Climate disasters are accelerating. The IPCC projects more frequent and severe events. Hybrid warfare is becoming the norm rather than the exception - operations below the threshold of armed conflict, exploiting vulnerabilities, creating plausible deniability. And Women, Peace and Security frameworks, while robust for armed conflict, haven't fully evolved to address this intersection.

We need to stop treating gender and hybrid threats as separate analytical tracks. The patterns proposed in this article offer a starting point:

• Deliberate targeting reminds us that women aren't just collateral damage - they're often the target
• Structural exploitation reveals how existing inequalities can result in gendered collateral damage
• Resilience undermining reveals how women's ability to recover and adapt gets systematically constrained
• Women as actors challenges victimization narratives and reveals complexity
• Protective factors points toward solutions we're overlooking
• Research gaps identifies where we're missing critical information

For policymakers, this means:

• WPS National Action Plans need sections on climate-hybrid threat intersections
• Disaster response protocols need gender analysis of hybrid threat vulnerabilities
• Counter-disinformation strategies should protect women politicians, media figures, academics, and environmental defenders
• Early warning systems should flag gendered exploitation patterns
• Recovery planning must account for blocked resilience pathways

For researchers, this means:

• Study women's roles in crisis operations - both constructive and destructive
• Examine technical military operations for gender-differentiated impacts
• Investigate the disinformation-trafficking connection
• Document protective factors and resilience mechanisms
• Fill the gaps this article identifies

For practitioners, this means:

• When ransomware hits healthcare, remember it hits women workers hardest
• When forests are threatened, remember women's subsistence dependence
• When borders close, remember women make up 80% of climate displaced
• When power fails, remember women do the unpaid care work
• When disinformation spreads, remember women leaders are specific targets

The Path Forward

Here's the thing about hybrid warfare in climate disaster contexts: it thrives on our failure to see the whole picture. Separately, we understand climate impacts. Separately, we understand hybrid threats. Separately, we understand gender inequality. But the exploitation happens at the intersections - where climate stress meets deliberate manipulation meets existing power imbalances.

The good news? Once you recognize the pattern, you can't ignore it. Once you understand how power outages weaponize women's care work, how deforestation targets women's subsistence, how trafficking networks await displacement - you start asking different questions. Seeing different vulnerabilities. Imagining different solutions.

The bad news? We're late to this. The tactics are already being employed. But late is better than never. And awareness is the first step toward defense.

The next climate disaster is coming. The question is whether we'll see the whole risk landscape - including the ways it will land hardest on women - or whether we'll keep fighting the last war while the real battle happens in plain sight.

The smoke is clearing. Let's start seeing clearly.