FLORIAN KRAMPE
Building peace is never straightforward but there is an increasing awareness that the challenge will become exponentially more difficult in countries where climate change is amplifying social and political instability. Eight of the ten countries hosting the most multilateral peace operations personnel in 2018 are located in areas highly exposed to climate change (see table 1). Nonetheless, international efforts to build and maintain peace are not yet taking these emerging challenges systematically into account. This is concerning because the interactions between climate change and violent conflict prolong the latter, inhibit peacebuilding and increase the human costs of war.
Climate-related changes compound social, economic and political challenges, especially in regions in which agriculture is an important source of livelihoods. This results in climate-related security risks, which also means an increased likelihood of violent conflict. However, the impacts are temporally and spatially diverse, because different social, political and economic contexts and processes are exacerbated by different climate-related changes. The same is true of peacebuilding. Social, political and economic contexts shape both the conditions for and the sequencing of peacebuilding activities and determine the pathways for sustaining peace. After decades of top-down peacebuilding efforts, policy actors now realize that peacebuilding offers better pathways to peace when it is bottom-up, inclusive and able to address the grievances that gave rise to the conflict and those that result from war.
Drawing together insights from several past and ongoing research efforts, this policy brief offers insights on how climate-related security risks affect peacebuilding and makes recommendations to help future peacebuilding efforts become more climate-sensitive.
SUMMARY
- Eight of the ten countries hosting the most multilateral peace operations personnel in 2018 are located in areas highly exposed to climate change. As such, climate change is not just an issue of human security—it is transforming the entire security landscape. Nonetheless, international efforts to build and maintain peace are not yet taking these emerging challenges systematically into account.
This policy brief illustrates how climate change impacts the efficacy of peacebuilding, specifically the aim (a) to provide peace and security; (b) to strengthen governance and justice; and (c) to ensure social and economic development.
To better prepare for and adequately respond to what are increasingly complex peacebuilding contexts, peacebuilding efforts must become more climate-sensitive. Especially there is a need to (a) properly assess climaterelated security risks; (b) increase cross-agency knowledge exchange and learning; and (c) maximize synergies and realize climate action as opportunities to build sustainable peace.
This work is supported by funding from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research Mistra Geopolitics program and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs as part of SIPRI’s Climate Change and Security Project.