Navigating a just and peaceful transition: Environment of Peace (Part 3)

Conflict mitigation as a means of climate change adaptation: Lessons for policy and development practice

“…Adjusting systems, or responding to shocks, can easily further burden marginalized communities and particular identities if they are not included or considered in the intervention. This may inadvertently incite new or exacerbated conflict at varying scales (Abrahams & Carr, 2017;Carr, 2013Carr, , 2019Carr, , 2020Dabelko et al, 2013Dabelko et al, , 2022. For example, DanChurchAid et al (2020) found that, in Mali, climate change adaptation measures caused conflict in communities due to disputes over proposed land usage, as well as over reforestation projects on arable land.…”

“…Historically, the relationship between climate change and conflict has primarily been framed as a threat multiplier (e.g., Goodman & Baudu, 2023;Vogler, 2023), whereby climate change exacerbates conflict risk through different pathways that link ecological shocks with social, cultural, and political risks (Dabelko et al, 2022;Mercy Corps, 2023b;Sitati et al, 2021). However, focusing solely on how climate change can affect conflict is limiting (Abrahams & Carr, 2017), and often elides the many ways in which conflict can increase vulnerability to climate change by decreasing adaptive capacity (Dabelko et al, 2022;Mercy Corps, 2023b;Sitati et al, 2021). Conflict can exacerbate climate change vulnerability by negatively altering, among others, local poverty rates and market functions, political inclusion, gender equity, and social cohesion (Sitati et al, 2021;Vivekananda et al, 2014).…”

“…It is about the political, physical, and even temporal barriers (Abrahams, 2020;Barnett, 2020;Barnett & Adger, 2007;Mercy Corps, 2023b). With limited, if any exception, conflict and violence also degrade institutions'-public and private, as well as formal and informal-capacity to respond to climate change (Dabelko et al, 2022;Mohamed-Katerere, 2014). Given this, more needs to be done both theoretically and practically to make these sorts of declarations actionable.…”

“…Third, we need to understand how the tools for examining, addressing, and measuring conflict and conflict sensitivity can be applied to climate change adaptation efforts. Otherwise, we risk driving unintended consequences that can feed, rather than resolve, cycles of vulnerability (Dabelko et al, 2013(Dabelko et al, , 2022Meijer & Remling, 2023). These risks exist at the local, national, and subnational scales (Dabelko et al, 2022;Swatuk & Wirkus, 2018); the identification of such risks enables a higher likelihood of programmatic success for both climate and conflict-related interventions.…”

Beyond greenwashing: Prioritizing environmental justice in conflict-affected settings

“…Recent research focusing on the environment as a tool for conflict prevention and peacebuilding, disaster risk reduction, and post-disaster reconstruction also warns about the potential negative implications of some approaches for marginalized communities (Brown & Nicolucci-Altman, 2022;Dabelko et al, 2022;Ide, 2020;Reynolds, 2017). In this article, we seek to bring further attention to this stream of work by pointing to the importance of an environmental justice framing in environmental peacebuilding initiatives, as well as in the broader sphere of environmental and climate action in conflict-affected settings.…”