“Addressing the issue of the environment in the context of conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacekeeping, [and] peacebuilding becomes ever more important because we know from everything we have learned—and are learning every day—about climate change that one thing is for certain: The world is going to be under more stress,” says UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner in a short expert interview on YouTube.

Yet in another original Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) video, Steiner emphasizes that environmental issues do not lead inexorably to conflict. “History shows that human societies are not prone to looking for conflict but rather for conflict resolution, particularly when it comes to fundamental elements of life support systems, be it water, or be it clean air or other issues—we have seen the model of cooperation emerge.”

Steiner was at the Wilson Center in March 2009 for the launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report by UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme. 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.

Watch other short expert commentaries—on water, demographic security, climate change and security, and other issues—on ECSP’s YouTube channel.

Did you notice the rash of AFRICOM coverage last week? The Washington Post and the Washington Times (as well as the military’s own Stars and Stripes) published articles on the U.S. military’s newest combatant command and its attempts at military-to-military cooperation and hearts-and-minds diplomacy in Africa.

As part of a seven-month operation the military is calling the Africa Partnership Station, the USS Nashville is attempting to help stabilize the waters off of West Africa, which are plagued by illegal fishing, drug trafficking, and illegal migration, as well as robberies and kidnappings in the Niger Delta. According to the International Maritime Bureau, these waters are now the second-most dangerous in the world, after Somalia’s.

The Post aptly noted that the Nashville’s “mission appears to be as much about wooing Africa as about teaching maritime security.” Each time the Nashville docks, military doctors offer free checkups, and sailors repair local buildings and train host-country soldiers. This low-profile approach seems designed to allay Africans’ earlier fears of U.S. colonialism, which forced the U.S. military to headquarter AFRICOM in Germany instead of Africa.

Why the sudden surge in publicity for AFRICOM, when it’s been doing these kinds of outreach and confidence-building activities for more than a year? Perhaps President Obama, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and others in the new administration see AFRICOM as an example of a foreign policy that places as much emphasis on diplomacy and development as on defense. Indeed, even Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, who was appointed by former President Bush, has called for a rebalancing of the instruments of U.S. power; in 2007, he said, “We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.”

Photos: Top—Portugal Navy Lieutenant Commander Antonio Mourinha and a Gabonese Sailor inspect a holding bay for fish after boarding an illegal fishing vessel during Africa Partnership Station (APS) Nashville’s fisheries engagement April 29, 2009. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class David Holmes) Bottom—Chief Machinist’s Mate Brian Wallace, embarked with USS Nashville for Africa Partnership Station (APS), conducts training on small boat engine repair and maintenance during a 13-day port visit to Cameroon, April 6, 2009. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Matthew Bookwalter)

“Recently, the Defense Department warned that lack of Chinese transparency and dialogue between the Chinese and US militaries could lead to dangerous miscalculations on both sides. The tense confrontation between a US Naval survey vessel and five Chinese ships in the South China Sea in March echoed the rather serious 2001 Hainan Island incident, which was characterized by mutual suspicion and public acrimony. That event affected US-China relations for years.

To avoid further incidents, the Defense Department desires ‘deeper, broader, more high-level contacts with the Chinese,’ said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell. The White House issued a statement stressing the ‘importance of raising the level and frequency of the US-China military-to-military dialogue,’ and President Obama quickly laid the groundwork by meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in London and agreeing to work to improve military-to-military relations.

One such way to begin military dialogue between the United States and China is by using environmental issues.

Environmental collaboration is unlikely to hit politically sensitive buttons, and thus offers great potential to deepen dialogue and cooperation. Military-to-military dialogue can facilitate the sharing of best practices on a range of environmental security issues.”

To read the rest of this op-ed, co-authored by ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and Kent Hughes Butts, director of the National Security Issues Branch of the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College, please visit the Christian Science Monitor.

The 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.

“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.

“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:

1. Improve the capacity for early warning and action “in countries that are vulnerable to conflict over natural resources;”


2. 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;


3. Address natural resource and environmental issues in the initial peacemaking and peacekeeping processes;


4. Incorporate natural-resource and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies in order to avoid a relapse into conflict;


5. Help countries use their natural resources to promote economic growth, while practicing good governance and environmental sustainability; and


6. Promote confidence building and cooperation between conflicting groups that have shared interests over natural resources and the environment.
   

Photo: Cover of UNEP’s “From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment,” featuring an image of Nigerian soldiers with the UN’s African Mission in Darfur patrolling a bombed village. Courtesy of Lynsey Addario/Corbis and the UN Environment Programme.

The security community needs to “tell leaders that they won’t be able to guarantee security in a world where we don’t control climate change,” says Nick Mabey in this video from the Environmental Change and Security Program. “Because unless we have the authority of the security establishment and the foreign policy establishment at the table,” he says, “there’s no chance of both delivering the trillions of dollars needed to create a new clean energy economy, but also mak[ing] those tough choices.”

“There are political and economic vulnerabilities that are in fact more important—or seem more important—to the participants of conflict than the physical vulnerability to climate change,” said Clionadh Raleigh at the February 19, 2009, event, “Climate Security Roundtable: U.S. and EU Research and Policy.” Raleigh, a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, was joined by Nick Mabey, founding director and chief executive of E3G, and Sharon Burke, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to discuss climate change’s impact on conflict and how the United States and European Union (EU) have begun to adapt their foreign and security policies to the threat of climate change.

Ecological Change, Migration, and Conflict: A Complex Story

“The lack of access to power for certain communities, certain ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and basic access to resources among the most vulnerable populations has led to people misinterpreting the relationship that ecological change plays in their decision to either participate in conflict or to migrate,” Raleigh said. Although Raleigh’s research, which examined civil conflicts from 1990 to 2004, found that population density and growth were related to higher risks of conflict, “environmental pressures were not more likely to cause conflict in poor states—and not more likely during periods of instability,” she concluded. “Social, political, and economic factors are the most important determinants of civil war within developing countries,” she emphasized. “Poverty and unequal development come up time and time again.”

According to Raleigh, fears of mass international migration in response to climate change are overplayed. “Individuals and communities have quite a lot of coping mechanisms to deal with ecological difficulty,” including migration from rural to urban areas in the same country, she explained. Most migration, including labor and distress migration, “is temporary, internal, and circular,” she emphasized. “There is very little to no evidence that there will be an increase in international migration” in response to ecological change, although “there is evidence that there will be an increase in internal migration.”

Climate Change and Security: Perspectives from the EU

“Climate change is serious,” emphasized Mabey. “It’s a threat multiplier, it will make unstable places less stable—it’s going to change strategic interests, alliances, borders, threats, economic relationships, comparative advantages, the nature of international relations, and the legitimacy of the UN.” In the future, “security policy will need to get more preventive and risk-based because climate change just injects a huge bolt of uncertainty into the future,” said Mabey. He urged the expansion of forward-looking information systems that provide policymakers with the data they need to make decisions at the geopolitical, strategic, and operations levels. He also said security experts should strive to communicate the potential consequences of climate change to decisionmakers.

The EU has taken steps to integrate climate change into its security strategy; Great Britain, Germany, and Denmark have taken the lead. The Arctic has been a particular focus, with security experts examining trade routes, maritime zones, and new access to resources. Climate change “is not all about instability” in fragile, impoverished states, Mabey explained. “The Arctic is by far the most important climate security issue in the minds of traditional foreign-policy types in Europe.”

Environmental Security Gets a New Tool: The Climate War Game

Last year, Burke helped conduct a climate change war game based on a scenario of extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires, and cyclones. “Every country sort of hewed to what you would expect,” said Burke of the high-profile participants from China, India, Europe, and the United States. “The EU team spent the first two hours debating whether they could really be a country; the Indian team instantly came up with a negotiating strategy that sounded cooperative and brilliant but was completely impossible to execute; the Chinese team was, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything unless you pay us’; and the American team was keen to lead, only nobody was following.” One of the key lessons from the game, Burke explained, was that “everything comes down to what China is prepared to do.”

In developing the game, Burke and her colleagues discovered “that there’s a vast poverty of the kinds of information that you need to make decisions.” As Burke explained, policymakers need specific data “to obligate large amounts of money and personnel,” and the game revealed that “policymakers don’t have the information they need to make decisions.”

Photos: From top to bottom, Clionadh Raleigh, Nick Mabey, and Sharon Burke. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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