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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category environmental peacemaking.
  • Environmental Management: A Critical Tool for Environmental Peacebuilding

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    Guest Contributor  //  January 9, 2023  //  By Richard Marcantonio
    Book Covers

    On July 28, 2022 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted—by a count of 161 in favor, with 8 abstentions — that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. Building on the similar declaration by the UN Human Rights Council in October 2021, the UNGA has now reinforced the notion that the growing assaults on human health through environmental hazards are transgressions against the basic rights and freedoms of people.

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  • One Earth, one security space: from the 1972 Stockholm Conference to Stockholm+50 and beyond

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    Guest Contributor  //  November 22, 2022  //  By David Michel
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    This article was originally published by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

    The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment marked a watershed in world environmental politics. Gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, the international community collectively recognized that the technologies and economic models that enable modern development were also driving unsustainable environmental degradation, compromising the vital natural systems on which human well-being depends.

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  • Food Security as a Driver for Sustainable Peace in Kenya

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    From the Wilson Center  //  September 12, 2022  //  By Yiran Ning
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    “The food system is complex; it is not just about food production,” said Florence Odiwuor, a Kenyan Southern Voices for Peacebuilding Scholar, at a recent event on the role of food security systems in sustainable peacebuilding in Africa hosted by the Wilson Center’s Africa Program. As a lecturer at the School of Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Environmental Studies at Rongo University, Odiwour observed that given the food system’s interconnectedness with issues like education, gender, finance, and labor, “disruptions or failures in the [food] system have caused a lot of conflict in [Kenya].”

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  • Creating an Environment of Peace Means Avoiding Backdraft

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    Guest Contributor  //  August 15, 2022  //  By Noah Bell & Geoffrey D. Dabelko
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    A new contribution in a continuing series examining “backdraft” — the unintended consequences of climate change responses — and how its effects might be anticipated and minimized to avoid conflict and promote peace.

    The much-needed transition to a zero carbon, green economy offers opportunities to contribute to peace, but only if the conflict risks of transition are understood and managed to produce a just and peaceful transition. That means minimizing “backdraft”—the unintended negative impacts of transition that are a key obstacle to that goal.

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  • Transformative Climate Security: A Conversation with Josh Busby

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    New Security Broadcast  //  July 22, 2022  //  By Amanda King

    States and Nature Thumbnail ImageWhy does climate change lead to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not others? In this week’s New Security Broadcast, Josh Busby, Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, discusses the latest thinking on this essential question as laid out in his new book, States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security, with ECSP Program Associate, Amanda King, and ECSP Senior Fellow, Sherri Goodman.

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  • Climate Finance: Taking Stock of Investments and Opportunities to Sustain Peace

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    Guest Contributor  //  July 18, 2022  //  By Cesare M. Scartozzi, Adam Savelli & Giulia Caroli
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    A new contribution in a continuing series examining “backdraft” —the unintended consequences of climate change responses—and how its effects might be anticipated and minimized to avoid conflict and promote peace.

    A key pillar of the UNFCCC was a commitment by industrialized nations to cover the incremental cost of climate change mitigation for developing countries. As part of this pledge, they agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020 and maintain that level of funding up to 2025. While there are questions on whether this target has been met, climate finance has undeniably become one of the largest channels of wealth redistribution from developed to developing countries.

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  • Taking Stock of Environmental Peacemaking at 20

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    On the Beat  //  March 11, 2022  //  By Shruti Samala
    Bagamoyo,,Tanzania,-,January,2020:,Young,Girls,In,Tanzanian,School

    “Environmental peacemaking is inherently an optimistic kind of thing,” said Larry Swatuk, Professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, during a breakout session of the 2nd International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. Yet “alternative dispute resolution, making nice, building trust—I just see those spaces closing off,” said Swatuk. “Where resources are concerned and sovereignty is an issue there is a lot of hardball going on that we ignore at our peril. I think we need to reconfigure the peacemaking approach in light of the unwillingness of states to depart from classic statecraft.” 

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  • Hydropolitics in the Russian – Ukrainian Conflict

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    Guest Contributor  //  March 1, 2022  //  By Mehmet Altingoz & Saleem Ali
    Dry,Grass,Burns,In,The,Channel,Of,The,Unused,North

    It’s telling that one of the first actions that Russian forces took in their invasion of Ukraine was to blow up a dam on the North Crimean Canal (NCC), allowing water to flow back into Crimea. The current war being waged by Russia in Ukraine has its origins in fractured and contested political history, but there are also key natural resource security questions which often go overlooked. While there are established debates about the extent to which natural resources contribute to conflict, the current conflagration exemplifies a rare use of water as a means of direct leverage in a military standoff. Regardless of the outcome of the conflict, the tensions between Russia and Ukraine over the NCC illustrate the need to consider the role of natural resources—and access to them—in broader diplomatic efforts.

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