In today’s “Relief, Recovery, and Peace” episode on New Security Broadcast, we’re featuring an interview recorded by the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program (MEP) with Peter Schwartzstein, a Wilson Center Global Fellow and environmental journalist. In a conversation with MEP director, Merissa Khurma, Schwartzstein discusses the impact of the war in Gaza on COP28 and environmental peacebuilding efforts more broadly in the region. He also talks about how to advance the new theme of peace in COP discussions and what his hopes are for a best-case scenario coming out of the upcoming summit. Read selected highlights of the discussion below, and listen to the entire conversation here: Relief, Recovery, and Peace: Peter Schwartzstein on COP28’s New Theme, or watch the interview on the Wilson Center website. 

On the war in Gaza’s impact on “peace” as a theme at COP28

There’s a bitter irony to it all. In some ways, one might imagine that this is perhaps a sideshow in COP terms. I mean, both Israel and Palestine are relatively small countries, with relatively small economies and relatively minimal contributions to global emissions… But, there is indeed a pretty enormous, potentially debilitating, impact on the upcoming COP, in that much of the most important work at a COP is the diplomatic maneuvering that takes place in the months ahead of it. And as we’re seeing, at the moment, most of the region’s diplomatic energy, certainly but even much of the wider Western and global diplomatic attention, has been devoured by the fallout from this war. And that is potentially fatal for the talks.

On dialogue leading up to the summit

In a climate of conflict, one can’t push ahead with many of the tangible, mutually beneficial, on the ground, infrastructure projects that these kinds of organizations [i.e. EcoPeace Middle East] have been instrumental in spearheading. You can’t build the solar fields in the Jordanian desert for both Palestinian and Israeli benefit, as the Emirates and Jordanians have collectively planned for quite some time. You can’t push ahead with the construction of desalination facilities on the Mediterranean for Jordanian and Palestinian benefit, as both people so desperately need. So from the point of view of actually building things, this is putting them on hold. But from the point of view, even more importantly than that, of cultivating that environment of trust, which is required to push ahead with environmental peacebuilding schemes, this is generating intense animosity and a very different set of emotions than those required at a time as pivotal as this.

On elevating the theme of peace in the context of the war

I hope that the host government and every government within the region and further afield are able to appreciate that, as horrible as this current situation is, it is not the only looming danger. This COP takes place against the backdrop of really fast-intensifying climate stressors, which, as we know, are striking the Middle East and North Africa with even greater fury and even greater speed than they are in most other parts of the world. And the very reason that we have a planned peace and security component at this COP is that we know with ever greater certainty… that those climate stressors and wider environmental degradation play a pretty significant role in these mushrooming numbers of conflicts, large and small, that are breaking out in ever greater numbers across the Middle East, Africa, and other parts of the world.  So it will be extremely difficult for the organizers in Dubai and everybody else to keep their collective eye on the ball at a time when people’s potentials are so understandably drawn elsewhere. But this is a danger in both human security and physical security terms that will create suffering on a scale that, again, in the grand scheme of things, will make that in the Gaza Strip at the moment look kind of meager by comparison. There’s already a lot of misery that’s baked in with the 1.5 or more degrees of warming that we’re on track for. But were we to go towards the more than two degrees Celsius of warming that currently looks like it’s on the cards, then the implications for peace and security, particularly in this region, would be unimaginable.    

On the “best-case scenario” for COP28

What I really hope to see and what I think would be deemed a genuine success is an agreement to reign in, or at least some variation of an agreement to reign in, fossil fuel use to a greater extent than we’ve seen thus far in Sharm el-Sheikh at COP 27. Last year, we had some success on climate adaptation, which is helping many of the poorest, worst-affected countries in the world adapt to some of the climate consequences that are coming that way. But we need much, much more work on climate mitigation that is reigning in the emissions use that we know, beyond all doubt, is primarily responsible for that warming. Now, that will be difficult. Even in a non-Gaza war-type situation, there has been a lot of understandable fury in the months and years leading up to this event from many poor countries that feel quite correctly that richer parts of the world are not living up to their commitments. And as a consequence, there has been something of a fixation, again, an understandable one on their part, on the funding that they feel ought to be coming their way to deal with these looming crises.  But I fear, and this is far from a unique fear, that we have slightly lost sight of the absolute necessity of ensuring that this already very serious crisis that will come from the 1.5, 1.8, or so degrees of warming that appears to be baked in doesn’t become an amount of warming that perhaps no degree of climate adaptation funding will be capable of surmounting. So we really do hope, beyond the expectations of many of my colleagues, that this will be the event where that truth is hammered home.