In January, the Biden Administration released the Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. It is a sweeping document that integrates climate concerns into policy and governance, including into national security. It recognizes that environmental security, the integration of environmental considerations into national security strategy, policy, and programs, is essential to combat the global climate crisis and should be mainstreamed across U.S. government efforts. The idea is not a new one. One of the authors (Goodman) led early environmental security efforts in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for 8 years of the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, during the first chapter of awareness of environmental considerations in defense and foreign policy.

Although it wasn’t a priority for the previous administration, environmental security is a field that has had a foothold in the U.S. government for more than three decades. After the Cold War, Department of Defense (DoD) environmental security initiatives became a priority. They included closing excess military bases and expediting environmental cleanup, engaging in the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation Program to reduce nuclear waste from decommissioned, Russian submarines and conducting high-level Mil-Mil Environmental Security engagements around the world through the Defense International Environmental Cooperation Program. These early government-led environmental security efforts focused on ameliorating environmental damages, creating opportunities for military-to-military engagements, and promoting U.S. leadership through multilateral collaboration.

Today, as we experience intensifying natural disasters at home and abroad, growing global demand for energy, increasing resource scarcity, climate-related migration, sea-level rise, pervasive drought, and more, the Biden administration should once again apply an environmental security lens to its engagement on climate. But it’s also time that the administration take up an environmental peacebuilding approach.

Environmental peacebuilding recognizes that cooperation over environmental issues can be a tool for building peace by both minimizing conflict related to natural resources (negative peace) and supporting the presence of peacebuilding practices, such as justice, integration, and opportunity (positive peace). Environmental initiatives can bring conflicting groups together or help to eliminate conditions of scarcity which fuel conflict. They can also help develop community cohesion, work towards just environmental conditions, and ensure opportunity for future generations.

By prioritizing human security, entering the international conversation softly, acting on longer time frames, practicing participatory processes at home and abroad, and promoting environmental justice, the Biden administration can apply a peacebuilding lens to its climate engagement. And with leadership from the top in the Biden administration, these priorities can become strategic pathways of building trust, peace, and security.

Why Environmental Security Matters

In its early days, environmental security focused on governmental engagement with NGOs and citizens as stakeholders.This opened the door to greater transparency about DoD activities and the need to include the surrounding community in decisions about remediation activities on military bases. The inclusion of stakeholders in multiple DoD environmental processes in the 1990s was progressive in that era, yet the focus on remediation projects—which primarily impacted bases and their surrounding communities—is no longer sufficient for today’s human security challenges.

Updated understandings of climate change and standards around justice and inclusion demand even stronger priorities around human and community security. Climate change affects every way in which we conceive national and human security, from our strategic decision-making at the highest levels to local climate resilience strategies. Each year, climate change makes building a “sustainable peace” increasingly difficult, strengthening the imperative to act boldly and to act now. An environmental peacebuilding focus on human security and opportunities to foster cooperation pushes us beyond a narrow focus on eliminating conflict toward a focus on developing the conditions for long-term stable, sustainable, and just peace.

The Convergence of Climate Change and Peacebuilding

Actions by the previous administration over the last four years signaled to the international community that United States was ignoring what much of the world perceives as a global threat. With a series of executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Agreements, the Biden Administration has signaled with confidence that we are back in the climate conversation. We must, however, reenter international climate dialogues with humility, recognizing that we have been absent from important deliberations for several years and that progress has been made. Global insights on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience are rich and diverse. By engaging with the work of others, we can hone our own comprehensive response to the crisis.

We must also adapt how we do business. This includes acting on longer time frames. While our executive branch operates on four-year cycles, that reference frame is too short for the sustained, long-term investments needed to address a chronic crisis such as climate change. Longer time frames must be integrated into both risk assessments and responses. For instance, as we set emissions targets for 2035 and 2050, we must align security and peacebuilding strategies on similar timeframes. Another approach is to increase collaboration among diverse agencies within the federal government as a way to ensure that environmental security and peacebuilding priorities are maintained even when the next administration comes into office. It may seem far off from our present vantage point, but for a world more than 4 billion years old, 4 years is only a drop in our rising oceans.

An Environmental Peacebuilding Paradigm

The application of a peacebuilding framework encourages us to practice participatory processes at home and abroad. Peacebuilding and development fields have moved away from the colonial approach of telling communities what they need, towards an approach built on listening to community priorities and collaborating to build solutions, known as the “local turn” in peacebuilding. When engaging in environmental peacebuilding programs, government or military actors can provide the tools and information a community needs to make decisions, but centering local voices is the priority. Communities can also be engaged through participatory research projects that lead to a community stake in research findings and willingness to respond with direct action. Programs which are inclusive of community stakeholders and their needs make them more resilient to face future environmental security challenges.

Finally, environmental peacebuilding requires the promotion of environmental justice. One of the authors of this article (Goodman) issued the first DoD Environmental Justice policy in 1995. It was forward-looking for its era, inclusive of community needs around cleanup of contaminated sites and pollution surrounding military bases. However, we now know more about climate change and new environmental contaminants. One example is PFOA/PFOS, the so-called “forever chemical.” Knowledge about its impacts on community health should inspire urgent action to protect communities that are vulnerable. And knowledge about the effects of climate change in vulnerable areas should inspire the same. Both at home and overseas, environmental justice can address areas where social vulnerability, conflict potential, and climate risks intersect with one another. Environmental justice interventions should invest in areas that face the greatest combined risk, which can begin to be identified by tools like the EPA’s EJSCREEN or California’s CalEnviroScreen. Environmental peacebuilding enables a broader concept of environmental justice attuned to today’s escalating climate and environmental risks.

The time has come for environmental peacebuilding to be taken up alongside environmental security. Both at home and abroad, responses to the climate crisis must be robust, interdisciplinary, rooted in science, and cognizant of community concerns. Biden’s executive order takes substantive steps in that direction by approaching the environment through a national security lens. Through strong leadership, trust-building, and clearly laid priorities, it is possible to further pursue justice, peace, and sustainability even during the climate crisis. It will take dedicated efforts, but environmental peacebuilding sets us on the path to a brighter (yet cooler) future.