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Beware the Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding
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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.
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To Help Save the Planet, Stop Environmental Crime
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Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the Anthropocene Epoch. Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, inflicting changes that may persist for millennia.We are razing the planet’s last intact wild lands, degrading, deforesting, carving up, and destroying huge swathes of habitat. We’re overfishing and poisoning our rivers and oceans. We continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising CO2 levels and hastening climatic changes that are already affecting all life on Earth.
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Protecting the Protectors: Environmental Defenders and the Future of Environmental Peacebuilding
›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. -
To Address Climate Risks, Advance Climate Security in the United Nations
›Climate change is widely recognised as one of the major forces shaping the future. Climate impacts illustrate in stark clarity how human actions fundamentally affect the basic physical processes of the planet with vast and, in the worst cases, disastrous consequences for communities around the world. Given these profound impacts, climate change is increasingly treated as a security risk. As a changing climate is causing and will continue to cause diverse impacts across the globe, the associated security challenges are multifaceted. They involve human, community, state, and international security risks, and will require responses across all levels of decision-making, from the local to international. -
The Environment Has Become a Hostage of Armed Conflict
›This year, 2019, marked a new nadir for the environment that may reflect an ominous trend in warfare: Environmentally sensitive targets are being weaponized and taken hostage. Farmland went up in flames and burning oil tankers dominated the headlines, serving as a stark reminder of conflict’s ripple effects.
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Climate Change, Conflict, and Peacebuilding in Solomon Island Communities
›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.
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Defying Boundaries: Using Climate Risks to Forge Cross-Border Agreements
›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.
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Is Environmental Peacebuilding the Answer to South Sudan’s Conflict?
›September 12, 2019 marks one year since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and former Vice President-turned-opposition leader Riek Machar signed a new peace agreement. The human and environmental cost of the five-year war it ended has been staggering. Women and girls have often borne the brunt of the violence. Fighting and displacement have also placed tremendous pressure on the country’s abundant wildlife and natural resources. Militarized cattle raiding and competition over access to traditional grazing lands threaten the country’s tenuous stability. Gender-sensitive environmental peacebuilding promises to be one of the strategies needed to resolve these multiple challenges.
Showing posts from category environmental security.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the 
Early scholarship on 
Climate change is widely recognised as one of the major forces shaping the future. Climate impacts illustrate in stark clarity how human actions fundamentally affect the basic physical processes of the planet with vast and, in the worst cases, disastrous consequences for communities around the world. Given these profound impacts, climate change is increasingly treated as a security risk. As a changing climate is causing and will continue to cause diverse impacts across the globe, the associated security challenges are multifaceted. They involve human, community, state, and international security risks, and will require responses across all levels of decision-making, from the local to international.
