Showing posts from category environmental peacemaking.
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From Assessment to Intervention: Redefining UNEP’s Role in Conflict Resolution
›April 9, 2009 // By Will Rogers
“Can we get beyond the point where environment and conflict always has to be a story of tragedy with no happy ending?” asked Achim Steiner at the March 24, 2009, launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
“I think we actually can provide a critical set of building blocks that would allow us to be not just lamenters on the sidelines,” but active problem-solvers, said Steiner, UNEP’s executive director. UNEP would like to put “green advisers, so to speak, with blue helmets” to examine peacebuilding “from an environmental, natural resource restoration point of view” and “minimize the potential for conflicts to escalate again,” said Steiner, who recently met with Alain Le Roy, UN undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, to discuss plans for embedding environmental advisers with UN peacekeeping troops.
Steiner was joined by Daniel Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment at the U.S. State Department, and Andrew Morton, manager of UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme, to discuss the report’s findings.
Natural Resources and the Conflict Continuum
According to From Conflict to Peacebuilding:- Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
- Such conflicts are twice as likely to relapse within the first five years of peace.
- Less than a quarter of peace agreements for these conflicts address natural-resource issues.
Environmental factors can contribute to conflict and subvert peace in three main ways:
- The inequitable distribution of resource wealth, competition for scarce or valuable resources, and environmental degradation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict.
- Natural resources can used as “a financing vehicle for conflict—sustaining conflict well beyond the point where conflict has its origin, to actually having become part of an at-war economy, a conflict economy,” Steiner said.
- Unresolved environmental issues can subvert peace negotiations, especially when warring parties have a stake in lucrative resources. If we do not understand “how environment and natural resources can undermine very volatile peace agreements,” Steiner warned, we can “find ourselves back where we started off from.”
Lessons Learned and the Way Forward
Natural-resource conflicts have direct impacts—like deforestation and desertification—and indirect impacts—like the disruption of livelihoods—that are devastating to communities, Morton said. They also weaken a government’s capacity to manage its industry and infrastructure, like waste management and water purification, creating new environmental problems—and thus possible future conflict.
But the environment also offers opportunities, Morton emphasized. In Rwanda, for instance, “we have gorilla tourism going on within a few kilometers of what, essentially, was a war zone.”
UNEP recommends that peacekeepers:- Assess the natural-resource and environmental issues underlying conflicts.
- Monitor and address natural-resource use in conflict areas.
- Incorporate resource-sharing agreements into peace deals.
- When cooperation is not possible, use punitive measures to end resource exploitation.
U.S.-UNEP Cooperation on Environment, PeacebuildingAccording to Reifsnyder, the U.S. government frequently supports UNEP initiatives, such as the $1.8 million in U.S. funding for a UNEP reforestation and energy-efficiency program in an internally displaced persons camp in Darfur. This project grew out of the post-conflict environmental assessment that UNEP recently conducted in Sudan.
Reifsnyder praised UNEP’s focus: “UNEP is uniquely positioned to play a real catalytic role within the UN system, bringing together various parts of the UN system to try to focus on the importance of natural resources and the importance of the environment in peacebuilding initiatives,” he said.
Photos: From top to bottom, Achim Steiner, Andrew Morton, and Daniel Reifsnyder. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Green Advisers Assisting UN Peacekeeping Troops: Is the Third Time the Charm?
›March 27, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoSpeaking at the Wilson Center earlier this week, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner said he recently discussed plans with Alain Le Roy, UN undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, to integrate environmental awareness into UN peacebuilding efforts. According to a study recently released by UNEP, From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment (see New Security Beat post), at least 18 violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources since 1990, but fewer than 25 percent of peace agreements for resource-related conflicts address natural resources. Steiner said he is hopeful that putting in “green advisers, so to speak, with blue helmets” could change that.
As someone who has followed the history of environmental security efforts for a long time, trust me—this is news. It’s not that Steiner’s idea of integrating environmental expertise into peacekeeping is novel; on the contrary, a “Green Helmets” force to respond to environmental conflicts was proposed unsuccessfully by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-89 and by then-UNEP Director Klaus Toepfer in 1998. Both of these proposals failed because many countries feared a dilution of the principle of sovereign control over their territory and natural resources. But Steiner’s less-ambitious, more-practical plan to provide environmental advisers to peacekeeping troops seems to hold promise for reducing the environmental impact of conflicts and choking the supply chain of illegal resources fueling them. We may see this new integrated peacebuilding approach in action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti.
Stay tuned for the archived video and transcript of Steiner’s talk, which also featured Daniel Reifsnyder of the U.S. Department of State and Andrew Morton of UNEP.
Photo: UNEP Director Achim Steiner. Courtesy of the Wilson Center and Dave Hawxhurst. -
VIDEO: Gidon Bromberg on the Jordan River Peace Park and the Good Water Neighbors Project
›March 13, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffThe Jordan River Peace Park will help “rehabilitate the river, create economic opportunities for communities on both sides of the river’s banks” and serve “as a concrete example of peacebuilding,” says Gidon Bromberg in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security program. In this short video, Bromberg, co-director of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) – which recently received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship – explains how the new Jordan River Peace Park will help build peace by bringing together Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian environmentalists.
To learn more about the Jordan River Peace Park, please visit: -
VIDEO: Gidon Bromberg on the Good Water Neighbors Project
›March 13, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff
“Water resources in our part of the world are shared. There is no major source of water that does not cross one or more political boundaries,” says Gidon Bromberg in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. “Therefore there is this natural interdependence between countries – but more obviously between communities.” And the Good Water Neighbors project uses that “rationale of interdependence to help create trust; to solve livelihood problems that our communities face.” In this short video, Bromberg, a 2008 Time Magazine Hero of the Environment, discusses the Good Water Neighbors project, one of the innovative cross-border initiatives of this award-winning NGO. -
New UNEP Report Explores Environment’s Links to Conflict, Peacebuilding
›March 10, 2009 // By Will Rogers“Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option—it is a security imperative,” says a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment (to be launched by Achim Steiner, executive director of UNEP, at a March 24, 2009, event at the Wilson Center). A joint product of UNEP and UNEP’s Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding, the report was co-authored by Richard Matthew of the University of California, Irvine, Oli Brown of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and David Jensen of UNEP’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch. Though environmental conditions are rarely – if ever – the sole precipitator of violent conflict and war, they do play an important role as a “threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability” that can ultimately lead to conflict.
Environmental factors can play a pivotal role along all points of the conflict continuum—from the outbreak of conflict, to the perpetuation of conflict, to the collapse of peace and return to violence. “Attempts to control natural resources or grievances caused by inequitable wealth sharing or environmental degradation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict,” the report says. In Darfur, for example, “water scarcity and the steady loss of fertile land are important underlying factors” that have combined with ethnic rivalry, human and livestock population growth, and weak governance to contribute to conflict.
Exploitation of natural resources also played a substantial role in financing and sustaining conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, and Cambodia, “transforming war and insurgency into an economic rather than purely political activity.” Economic incentives to control valuable natural resources can reinforce political fragmentation, derail a peace process, and even “undermine genuine political reintegration and reconciliation” after peace has been forged.
Not only can natural resources help precipitate violence, conflict can also affect natural resources, destroying people’s livelihoods and perpetuating the conflict cycle. During conflict, the environment can be transformed into a weapon of war that can endanger human health and disrupt and destroy livelihoods—as when wells are poisoned or crops are burned, for example. Environmental destruction disrupts “normal socio-economic patterns,” forces “populations to adopt coping strategies, and often leads to internal displacement or migration to neighboring countries.” And conflict can erode or destroy state institutions and civil society, exacerbating grievances (or creating new ones) and furthering the resource exploitation that fuels the conflict.
Successful peacebuilding therefore requires that “environmental drivers are managed, that tensions are defused, and that natural assets are used sustainably to support stability and development in the long term.” According to the report, successfully integrating natural resource and environmental issues into conflict prevention and peacebuilding strategies requires the United Nations and international community to:- Improve the capacity for early warning and action “in countries that are vulnerable to conflict over natural resources;”
- Implement economic sanctions and develop new legal strategies to improve “oversight and protection of natural resources during conflicts” to minimize their use in financing and sustaining conflict;
- Address natural resource and environmental issues in the initial peacemaking and peacekeeping processes;
- Incorporate natural-resource and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies in order to avoid a relapse into conflict;
- Help countries use their natural resources to promote economic growth, while practicing good governance and environmental sustainability; and
- Promote confidence building and cooperation between conflicting groups that have shared interests over natural resources and the environment.
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Reading Radar — A Weekly Roundup
›February 27, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffA new study published in Conservation Biology (abstract) calculates that more than 80 percent of major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 have taken place in one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. “The fact that so many conflicts have occurred in areas of high biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation warrants much further investigation as to the underlying causes, and strongly highlights the importance of these areas for global security,” says coauthor Russell A. Mittermeier. He and lead author Thor Hansen argue that protecting nature during war can help recovery, and call for integrating conservation “into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programs in the world’s conflict zones.”
The Bixby Forum, “World in 2050: A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Changes on a Divided Planet” included panels on population’s links to war, climate change, and the environment. Malcolm Potts, the chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bixby Center for Population Health and Sustainability recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his latest book, Sex and War.
In Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources from the Henry L. Stimson Center, experts from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East “examine the environmental dangers and policy dilemmas confronting the sustainable management of shared water resources in a warming world”—including the potential for conflict. In the concluding chapter, David Micheli finds that climate change is unlikely to lead to full-scale “water wars,” but warns that “rising climatic stresses on common waters will put new and perhaps unprecedented strains on cooperative governance institutions at the local, national, and international levels.”
Rampant logging fueled Cambodia’s decades-long civil war. Now a new report from transparency watchdogs Global Witness, Country for Sale, claims that the country’s emerging oil and mineral sectors may pose a similar threat. Says Gavin Hayman, “The same political elite that pillaged the country’s timber resources has now gained control of its mineral and petroleum wealth. Unless this is changed, there is a real risk that the opportunity to lift a whole generation out of poverty will be squandered.”
Thirty-three countries have been named “highly vulnerable” to the impact of climate change on their fisheries by a new study published in Fish and Fisheries. In these countries, two-thirds of which are in tropical Africa, fish accounts for 27 percent or more of daily protein intake, compared to 13 percent in non-vulnerable nations. InterPress examines the impact of acidification and rising surface temperatures on the fish stocks of coastal South Africa.
Photo: Fish-dependent people of Bangladesh could see their coastal catch reduced as a result of predicted increases in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms. Bangladesh is one of the nations identified as highly dependent on fisheries along with Cambodia, DR Congo, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Uganda. Photo credit: Mark Prein, courtesy of WorldFish Center. -
PODCAST – A Discussion on Climate Change and Security: Arctic Links and U.S. Intelligence Community Responses
›February 24, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“The climate issue also very clearly illustrates the whole complexity of the security issue,” says Henrik Selin. “Arctic melting is a national security issue in the traditional national security kind of way.” In this podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program, Selin, assistant professor of international relations at Boston University, and Stacy VanDeveer, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, sat down with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko to discuss the resonance of climate change in the U.S. security community.
VanDeveer and Selin were in Washington to speak at a January 12 event, “Governing the Climate: Lessons From the National Conference on Climate Governance.” VanDeveer has frequently coauthored articles with Dabelko, including “It’s Capacity, Stupid: International Assistance and National Implementation” in Global Governance, “European Insecurities: Can’t Live With ’Em, Can’t Shoot ‘Em” in Security Dialogue, and “Environmental Cooperation and Regional Peace: Baltic Politics, Programs, and Prospects” in Environmental Peacemaking. -
Weekly Reading
›From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, based on the work of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding, summarizes the links between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding, and includes 14 case studies of how natural resources affect—or are affected by—conflict.
The authors of “On Population Growth Near Protected Areas” come to an opposite conclusion from Wittemyer et al., who found a pattern of higher population growth near protected areas in Africa and Latin America. “To understand the disagreement, we re-analyzed the protected areas in Wittemyer et al.’s paper. Their results are simply artifacts of mixing two incompatible datasets,” write the authors. “Protected areas may experience unusual population pressures near their edges; indeed, individual case studies provide examples. There is no evidence, however, of a general pattern of disproportionate population growth near protected areas.”
“The President and I agreed to a new initiative that will further cross-border cooperation on environmental protection and environmental security,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, announcing plans for a U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue.
Scientists at Purdue University have teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive map of U.S. CO2 emissions.
Mark Weston, who writes for the Global Dashboard blog, posted an edited version of a recent talk he gave on West African demography and security.
“Can we get beyond the point where environment and conflict always has to be a story of tragedy with no happy ending?” asked Achim Steiner at the March 24, 2009, 
According to Reifsnyder, the U.S. government frequently supports UNEP initiatives, such as the $1.8 million in U.S. funding for a UNEP reforestation and energy-efficiency program in an internally displaced persons camp in Darfur. This project grew out of the 
“Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option—it is a security imperative,” says a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), 
