Women, law and climate resilience: closing the gap in Iraq's legal framework

Iraq is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable states, facing severe heat, desertification, dust-storms, rising salinity and water scarcity. These harms also serve to deepen existing gender inequalities in the country, with women, particularly those from rural and displaced communities, carrying disproportionate burdens – from lost livelihoods and health risks to early marriage, violence and exclusion from decision-making. Yet Iraq’s environmental laws remain gender-blind, outdated and weakly enforced. This paper, informed by lived experiences and comparative insights, considers this legal invisibility in climate frameworks. Combining legal mapping with insights drawn from 26 interviews with women in rural and urban areas, activists, lawyers, journalists and officials across ten provinces in Iraq, our research explores this disconnect between abstract ideas of the law. By mapping Iraq’s domestic laws and international obligations, our paper examines how gendered climate-harm is recognised (or rendered invisible) by the legal system. We argue that Iraq’s environmental instruments, including the 2009 Environmental Protection and Improvement Law No 27, constitutional Article 33, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and 2024–2030 Strategy, are poorly enforced and detached from women’s lived realities, which should be urgently addressed.