Environmental peacebuilding is a good idea. As a practice, it aims to address simultaneously environmental problems and challenges related to violent conflict. Examples include the promotion of environmental cooperation between rival states, conflict-sensitive adaptation to climate change, and restoring access to land and water in post-conflict societies. As a concept, environmental peacebuilding directs researchers’ and politicians’ attention to cooperative adaptation as a response to environmental stress. It thus helps to correct one-sided narratives about environment-conflict links.

Meaningful engagement with the social and conflict implications of climate change in Solomon Islands must be firmly grounded within local worldviews—within Solomon Islanders’ physical, economic, political, and social and spiritual worlds. As we note in a recent policy brief for the Toda Peace Institute, when addressing conflict challenges exacerbated or caused by climate change, approaches should be draw upon community understandings of what constitutes peace and justice. 

International political boundaries are arbitrary creations. Today’s borders are better described as imaginary lines on maps, rather than hard barriers between states. Often using mountains, rivers, or other geographical landmarks, modern borders are entrenched in historic tradition rather than logic and fact. As a result, today’s international borders are poorly equipped to handle modern challenges, in particular climate change, which has already begun to threaten the most important state resource, fresh water.

Climate change is a risk, said Maurice Amollo, a Mercy Corps Chief of Party in Nigeria Mercy Corps. “But it is also an opportunity if people come together.” He spoke at a recent USAID Adaptation Community Meeting, “Tackling the threat multiplier: Addressing the role of climate change in conflict dynamics.” The discussion focused on USAID’s Peace III initiative that Amollo and Mercy Corps implemented in the Karamoja region along the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda, where climate and conflict shocks are part of daily life for pastoralist ethnic groups. Addressing climate and conflict issues in these regions will require using the environment to build cooperation and peace, said Eliot Levine, the Director of Mercy Corps’ Environment Technical Support Unit.

The Arctic is changing, and it’s changing fast, even faster than models had predicted. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report found with strong confidence that the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average.