The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment, which has been rolling out in stages since last September, confirms a crucial divide in current climate thinking: efforts to adapt and mitigate to climate change are often considered separately from the vulnerability of people.

Climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability were covered by IPCC Working Group II, while Working Group III handled mitigation. Each group developed and released their reports separately. Why is this significant? Because in conflict and post-conflict societies, climate mitigation efforts can have significant impacts on existing tensions, sometimes even making them worse. It is therefore vitally important that policymakers understand these two sets of issues together and researchers build a better understanding of how they interact.

The Climate-Peacebuilding Nexus

Environmental issues in post-conflict societies have been paid more attention recently, as development and climate researchers and practitioners increasingly focus on the poor and vulnerable segments of society. This has been accompanied with a shift in the security community from a focus on state to human security. These changes have led to a higher profile for environmental issues in many post-conflict peacebuilding policies (e.g., Afghanistan).

While this is an important step to thinking about environmental issues and peacebuilding efforts together, research on the nexus of climate change adaptation and mitigation and their consequences for peacebuilding is almost nonexistent (an exception that looks closer at human security being the recent Wilson Center report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation). How are our efforts to reduce the impact of climate change affecting post-conflict societies? In an attempt to add to this body of knowledge, I recently looked at the development of micro-hydropower systems in Nepal and assessed whether they contribute to building peace.

Nepal’s Post-Conflict Fragility

In the wake of a decade-long civil war that ended in 2006, Nepal has successfully implemented many hydropower projects. Energy supplied through micro-hydropower systems – commonly defined as dams with an installed capacity under 100 kW – is crucial for climate change mitigation in Nepal and elsewhere. Hydropower provides more than 90 percent of the world’s renewable energy supply, and micro-hydropower systems are often recommended for rural communities thanks to their low environmental impact, fossil fuel independence, and ability to reach the poorest communities directly.

In the wider context of the food-water-energy nexus, micro-hydropower systems have also become an important area of study for peacebuilding. Development, and human development in particular, is frequently considered a ground condition for peace by the development community. It follows that, because they provide rural communities with clean energy and contribute to human development, micro-hydropower systems should help alleviate tensions in a place like Nepal, where rural poverty is widespread.

Surprisingly, however, it appears that these projects have contributed little to the peace process. My findings show that even though the micro-hydropower projects are supported by the central government, they contribute little to its political legitimacy, a crucial measure for maintaining peace in a post-conflict society. In fact, in the short run, I found micro-hydropower projects, in the absence of a functioning nation state, strengthened other forms of informal local authority, in part because of the way they were implemented, which shifts funding and implementation responsibilities to local communities. The result is one most peacebuilding scholars see as problematic. New, informal local authorities in post-conflict settings tend to weaken the legitimacy of formal state authorities, thus threatening the durability of peace.

This finding is new in the context of environmental peacebuilding. Even though it is too early to generalize beyond the studied cases, my research suggests policies like distributed hydropower can force policymakers into a dilemma: If a climate mitigation effort threatens peace and stability should a government stop it?

Accounting for the Local in Addressing a Global Problem

Climate change mitigation measures are first and foremost designed to address a global issue: minimizing the severity of climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. Yet, as Nepal shows, these efforts invariably interact with other local dynamics and policymakers should consider the potential consequences of these interactions, especially in the peacebuilding context.

Though initially my research shows signs of micro-hydropower projects weakening the peace process, the question of why is still unclear and there are signs of increased human development. It is highly likely a reduction in vulnerability and increased capacity to react and recover from crises, i.e. improved resilience, will prove significant. Increased human development has also been associated with a better ability to mediate social conflicts and more stable societal structures. The short-term weakening of the peace process may therefore be outweighed by other development gains in the long run, decreasing the vulnerability of the weakest segments of society and narrowing the gap between urban and rural, elites and the “ordinary” people of Nepal.

While the long-term outcome remains to be seen, it is clear that better understanding the nexus of vulnerability, mitigation, and peacebuilding is critical to ensuring that efforts to plan for climate change do not create more problems than they solve. Further, there may be opportunities for policymakers to strengthen and enhance peace processes through well-thought out and comprehensive climate strategies that neither impose irrelevant external agendas nor undermine rural livelihoods.

Climate change is a challenge that touches on nearly every sector of society and we should be prepared for mitigation efforts to do the same.