“This project is serious,” Casimiro Olvida said. “It will help the community. If you do not believe me, you can kill me anytime.” He recalled saying this in 1995 to Communist rebels in Mindanao who were suspicious that his USAID-funded team was supporting the Philippine government. We have the same goals, he told them, to help the poor and protect the environment. Apparently, he was convincing. Now Watershed Protection Project Manager of the Sarangani Energy Corporation, Olvida spoke in this week’s podcast with ECSP’s Lauren Risi, at the International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in October 2019, describing his decades of work in forest management in the Philippines.

Through open source information, remote sensing, and existing data, we can have a better sense of how conflict impacts the environment and how it then impacts people depending on the environment, said Wim Zwijnenburg, a Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader for the Dutch peace organization, PAX, in this week’s Friday Podcast. Wim sat down for an interview with ECSP’s Amanda King at the first International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding, hosted at the University of California, Irvine, in October 2019.

“I believe if you acknowledge women as primary users of environmental resources, if you draft the policy with women [at] the table, offering you their unique perspective and unique feedback, you’re going to have a more stable policy. A policy that gets implemented,” says Mishkat Al-Moumin, scholar in residence at the Environmental Law Institute, in this week’s Friday Podcast, and second in a series of interviews recorded at the First International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding.

United States and China are on the road to war, said Senior Advisor of New America’s Resource Security Program, Sharon Burke in this week’s Friday Podcast. “And if you’re an environmental peacebuilder and you’re not thinking about that, you might want to,” she added. She spoke with Geoffrey Dabelko, Professor at Ohio University and Senior Advisor to ECSP, at the first ever International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in October 2019 at the University of California, Irvine. It’s a war we can’t afford, said Burke. “But we’re not doing anything to avoid it at the moment, in my opinion, other than deterrence.”

In the years ahead, climate change and the proliferation of new technologies and information availability will require us to reshape our vision of shared waters. Because these megatrends are experienced in concert, the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties for shared water management will continue to compound over time.

While it is impossible to know precisely how shared water will look in the future, we should already be working to expand how we conceptualize shared waters, address inequities embedded within water management, and develop criteria and processes that successfully identify and include non-traditional shared water actors in decision-making. These shifts will strengthen our ability to generate creative and sustainable management strategies and help us avoid water-related conflicts.

Early scholarship on environmental peacemaking recognized the important role that local civil-society can play in promoting regional cooperation while, at the same time, pressuring governments to protect the environment. For example, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya in Uzbekistan and the Dashowuz Ecological Club in Turkmenistan, were at the forefront of the fight to restore the Aral Sea and protect the region’s biodiversity.