From Assessment to Intervention: Redefining UNEP’s Role in Conflict Resolution

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:
1. The inequitable distribution of resource wealth, competition for scarce or valuable resources, and environmental degradation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict.
2. 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.
3. 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.”
Conflicts involving high-value, portable resources—such as timber, oil, and minerals—and those involving scarce resources such as land and water generate “very different conflict dynamics,” emphasized Morton, so it is important to distinguish between them.

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.
“We can and must integrate these [lessons] into peacebuilding, conflict-preventing strategies,” Morton pressed. Demand for environmentally sensitive conflict-prevention and peacebuilding “will increase due to climate change, population growth, and some degradation,” he said. And UNEP is “tooling up to meet the challenge.”

U.S.-UNEP Cooperation on Environment, Peacebuilding

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 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.
Topics: climate change, conflict, environment, environmental peacemaking, environmental security, livelihoods, natural resources, population, security
- Sarah Scarlato
  
  Having environmental scholars and scientists become actively involved in UN peacekeeping operations seems like a great idea. The UNEP’s recommendation is sound and logical, but it seems like implementing these advisors is easier said than done. Some important questions come to mind when I read this article; the first being how much of a role are these advisors going to have? Are they going to be an active presence on the ground or will they have a more diplomatic role with higher level politicians and statesmen? Putting these advisors on the ground with the regular UN troops may seem like an effective method to address many environmental issues, but these advisors are not trained soldiers. They would be facing much higher threat levels than those of traditional UN soldiers and peacekeepers. Also, to what extent will these advisors have knowledge of the cultural background and histories of the people of these conflict ridden areas? It’s great to think that the UN can send in advisors and scientifically fix the problem, but what about the human aspect and local imprint that is left on the environment? Overall I think it makes good sense to have these advisors present in these areas to help develop solutions to resource conflicts; however I think more research and critical thinking about their specific role within UNEP peacekeeping operations needs to be addressed.
- http://www.blogger.com/profile/18337694112852162181 Geoff Dabelko
  
  Who and what roles for these green advisors is in the process of being worked out. Definitely security challenges in a number of these zones, but nothing that civilian development and humanitarian relief workers aren’t typically facing. And I think you are right to focus on knowledge of local dynamics as a key contribution these advisors could make. One example that jumped out of last year’s issue of National Geographic of all sources was the cover story on the gorillas and illegal charcoal trade in Eastern DRC in and around the Virungas park. The author gave an example of how the UN blue helmets even just parking one of their vehicles at a border crossing where park rangers could more easily confront corrupt Congolese military smuggling charcoal. They also were accompanying rangers on patrols for charcoal kilns. These would be the kind of innovations to crack down on illegal and unsustainable use of resources that green advisors might be able to work with blue helmets to realize.