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Abstract
Climate change is one of the undeniable and inevitable security threats of our time. In practically every part of the world, environmental challenges and gender discriminations have a variety of economic, social, and political repercussions, despite being distinct problem areas. In his speech at the UN Security Council in 2021, Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized the climate crisis as the defining issue of our time, highlighting its multiplier character that impacts ecosystems, political, economic, and social stability, and the increased risk of conflict due to water scarcity, declining agricultural productivity, damaging infrastructure, and population displacement.Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is one of the regions where these issue areas affect the fields that have a broad impact on peoples’ lives. Today, climate change influences almost all environmental, social, economic and political problems in the world and displacement emerges as a major consequence. MENA is a significant region where climate change affects vulnerable communities through forced displacement. There is a growing body of scholarly work on the intersection of climate change and migration, especially in the most vulnerable regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Pacific Islands. Despite the rapidly growing literature on migration in the MENA region, climate change is still often overlooked as a driver of security challenges when it comes to regional dynamics. Furthermore, there is lack of global interest where different genders, as in many domains, experience social phenomena such as displacement, in different ways due to emerging social, political, economic and cultural inequalities from patriarchal system. The key point is that displacement is often a result of climate change, although we are still unfamiliar with the gendered aspects of this occurrence. This thesis, built on structural approaches such as the theory of unequal exchange and feminist political economy, examines how environmental displacement in the MENA region has been shaped by historical dependencies and their effects on women's daily lives, thereby establishing a multifaceted research framework that addresses the underlying structural conditions of gender-based environmental displacement. It argues that environmental displacement, a major consequence of climate change, disproportionately affects women and girls in social, political and economic spheres due to patriarchal and unequal social structures in MENA as one of the most effected regions. This thesis advocates for more inclusive and consistent gender-sensitive approaches in both implementation and policy levels to advance the climate justice discourse in the MENA region. It will analyze the gendered impacts of environmental displacement in the MENA region by identifying its causes and consequences and gendered factors that intersect with it through a case study on Morocco. The findings will bridge the gap between gender, environment and migration studies in MENA, bringing a new interactive layer and helping to develop opportunities for gender and environment-specific interventions in migration to the international community on MENA, by analyzing a governmental report from Morocco as a good and pioneer example.