The rural poor in developing countries remain the most directly dependent on natural resources for their food and livelihood security (World Bank/FAO/ IFAD 2009, 423), while the livelihoods of 2.5 billion people depend wholly or partly on agriculture (FAO 2016, 1). Human stability and security depend on sustainable access to natural resources. The natural environment not only contributes to existing livelihoods, but offers a powerful frame of reference for human life, permeating the realms of spirituality and culture. It also provides a form of insurance against crisis for rural people, contributing to their resilience. 1 Yet the same lands and waters that communities living in poverty depend on can offer the promise of great wealth. Millions of the world's poorest people live in countries with valuable and abundant natural resources like oil, gas, and minerals. Many others live in or around forests that can be cut down for large-scale cultivation of biofuels, or in areas suitable for dam construction and the sale of water downstream. While these offer potential development benefits, the reality is that the benefits are limited, unequally shared, and many of the natural resources are non-renewable. For the people who depend most on the lands, waters and forests for daily survival, and see little or no profit from the sale of natural resources, the outlook is often bleak. Natural resources are lost to them, or become so polluted they are no longer useable. Such changes not only affect local communities, but also the whole of humanity. The articles in this issue are written by a range of development researchers, practitioners, and feminist activists. Today's feminist natural resource perspectives have their roots in the research and activism of feminist environmentalists, stretching back for many decades. 'Ecofeminism' provided a pioneering critique of neo-liberal economic development policies in the 1970s, linking gender equality to sustainable development. 2 In Latin America, 65 per cent of the 185 human rights defenders murdered in 2015 were working on environmental issues, including the activist Berta Caceres in Honduras, whose activism and murder in 2016 attracted international attention (Guevara-Rosas 2016). Gender equality and women's rights are core to attaining sustainable, just human development, and hence they are also key to securing natural resource justice. Authors highlight the effect extractive projects can have on women's rights and gender inequality. They discuss the strategies of women's natural resource rights defenders to hold governments, the
