“Most fundamentally, we turned the ‘resource scarcity drives conflict’ argument on its head and asked, ‘Can environmental interdependence drive cooperation in ways that can be harnessed to build trust and contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding?’” said Geoff Dabelko, Associate Dean at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, about Environmental Peacemaking, which was one of the first books to investigate these questions. In the 15 years since he and Ken Conca, a professor at American University’s School of International Service, published their edited volume, the idea that shared environmental issues could be used to build peace has become a focus of innovative research, policy, and programs.

In recognition of their contributions to the field, Conca, a former fellow at the Wilson Center and Dabelko, the former director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program,  were awarded the fifth annual Al-Moumin Award and Distinguished Lecture for Environmental Peacebuilding by United Nations Environment, the Environmental Law Institute, and American University. At the award ceremony at American University on January 30, Dabelko and Conca reiterated their call to reframe environmental concerns as catalysts for cooperation, rather than simply conflict.

 “No two individuals have shaped our institutional thinking on environmental peacebuilding more than Geoff Dabelko and Ken Conca,” said Erik Solheim, executive director of UN Environment in a press release marking the occasion. “We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for their innovative thinking and the paradigm shift they have catalyzed through their work.”

Environmental Peacemaking Launches a New Field

When Conca and Dabelko first began to study this field nearly three decades ago, the study of the connections between the environment and security was in its infancy, and mostly focused on the ways in which natural resources may be linked to violent conflict. Environmental peacemaking—using transboundary efforts to jointly manage shared resources as a foundation for peace—was a reaction to methodological in-fighting among academics and to the limited options for practitioners tackling environment and conflict links. Environmental peacemaking appeared to offer a more practical approach for addressing environment-linked instability.  

Conca and Dabelko’s book—among the first to document examples of transboundary environmental cooperation through a peacemaking lens—has had a profound impact on policymakers, academics, and practitioners. The UN Environment Program, for example, expanded the scope of their work to include post-conflict setting and fragile states facing environmental threats. Practitioners like Todd Walters, founder of International Peace Park Expeditions, have trained a new generation of environmental peacebuilders. And their ideas have been “utilized by diplomats at [the U.S. Department of] State to support hydro-diplomacy efforts and to forge new partnerships in regions around the world from South and Central Asia to the Baltics, South Africa and even along the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Wilson Center Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman.

Cooperation, Not Conflict: Principles of Environmental Peacebuilding

“Environmental change is often thought of as a trigger for conflict,” said Conca, in his Al-Moumin lecture. “Scarcity begets grievances, and that grievances beget violence, and I think some of the work that we’ve done has tried to challenge that simple equation.”

“What we risk losing in these narratives about security and conflict is the possibility to embrace these challenges,” Conca said of environmental issues. “We can cooperate around them; they bring people together—even people who may be not comfortable working together, who may be in conflict, who may be in a situation of fragility.”

Conca outlined three properties that make environmental issues uniquely capable of generating peace: First, “because environmental issues ignore human boundaries, they demand cooperation across those boundaries,” crossing the borders separating clans, identity groups, neighborhoods, and nations. Second, “the environment can create in people a very deeply rooted sense of place,” said Conca, strengthening shared identities and reducing the demand for conflict. And third, “environmental problems are technically complex, and they challenge us to think forward in an uncertain world,” thus pushing people to work together to address the uncertain future.

A Powerful Tool for Defense, Development, and Diplomacy

Goodman deployed these three principles as the former U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security during the Clinton administration. “We were using environmental cooperation among militaries, foreign ministries, citizens, and businesses to both address lingering challenges, such as cleaning up Cold War-era contamination from military sites, or to forge new support for cooperation on natural resource issues from water to conservation,” she said.

For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the poor storage and handling of spent fuel and radioactive waste from Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet raised concerns. The Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation Declaration, signed in 1996, established a framework for Russia, Norway and the United States to work together to reduce the risks to the fragile Arctic environment. And today, although the Arctic Council formally omits discussion of military issues, the region’s shared environmental concerns often spur cooperation between nations that can help increase trust, confidence, and stability—which is especially important now, as climate change opens up the Arctic to economic competition and political distrust between Russia and the United States reaches levels not seen since the Cold War.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

In his lecture, Dabelko detailed the difficulty in convincing certain groups to bring together issues of environment, peace, and security. First, practitioners had to grapple with the association of environmental concerns with simply conservation of charismatic species, rather than natural resources that were essential to the livelihoods of billions of people around the world.  “When one says ‘environment’,” Dabelko said, “for so many, they flash to hugging trees and hugging pandas.” For example, when UN Environment Program’s David Jensen, a leading figure in environmental peacebuilding, landed in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo to address environmental peacebuilding challenges, his local hosts took him to the zoo rather than the environment or finance ministries.

Other double standards hindered early efforts. “This endeavor has been often loaded up with fairly unrealistic expectations that other issue areas aren’t asked to do,” he said of environmental peacebuilding. Small-scale measures were viewed as insignificant because they would not be able to “resolve the underlying Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” for example. Most did not realize how critical natural resources, such as water and fertile land, are to fundamental stability.

Building peace through environmental concerns often contributes directly to building the economic and political foundations for more stable communities and countries. And Environmental Peacemaking helped lay the academic foundation for understanding that environmental issues can be pathways to peace—and that those pathways may be more effective if they tread the common ground of shared resources and shared challenges.