Speaking at the Wilson Center earlier this week, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner said he recently discussed plans with Alain Le Roy, UN undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, to integrate environmental awareness into UN peacebuilding efforts. According to a study recently released by UNEP, From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment (see New Security Beat post), at least 18 violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources since 1990, but fewer than 25 percent of peace agreements for resource-related conflicts address natural resources. Steiner said he is hopeful that putting in “green advisers, so to speak, with blue helmets” could change that.

As someone who has followed the history of environmental security efforts for a long time, trust me—this is news. It’s not that Steiner’s idea of integrating environmental expertise into peacekeeping is novel; on the contrary, a “Green Helmets” force to respond to environmental conflicts was proposed unsuccessfully by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-89 and by then-UNEP Director Klaus Toepfer in 1998. Both of these proposals failed because many countries feared a dilution of the principle of sovereign control over their territory and natural resources. But Steiner’s less-ambitious, more-practical plan to provide environmental advisers to peacekeeping troops seems to hold promise for reducing the environmental impact of conflicts and choking the supply chain of illegal resources fueling them. We may see this new integrated peacebuilding approach in action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti.

Stay tuned for the archived video and transcript of Steiner’s talk, which also featured Daniel Reifsnyder of the U.S. Department of State and Andrew Morton of UNEP.

Photo: UNEP Director Achim Steiner. Courtesy of the Wilson Center and Dave Hawxhurst.

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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.

A new study published in Conservation Biology (abstract) calculates that more than 80 percent of major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 have taken place in one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. “The fact that so many conflicts have occurred in areas of high biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation warrants much further investigation as to the underlying causes, and strongly highlights the importance of these areas for global security,” says coauthor Russell A. Mittermeier. He and lead author Thor Hansen argue that protecting nature during war can help recovery, and call for integrating conservation “into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programs in the world’s conflict zones.”

“The climate issue also very clearly illustrates the whole complexity of the security issue,” says Henrik Selin. “Arctic melting is a national security issue in the traditional national security kind of way.” In this podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program, Selin, assistant professor of international relations at Boston University, and Stacy VanDeveer, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, sat down with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko to discuss the resonance of climate change in the U.S. security community.

From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, based on the work of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding, summarizes the links between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding, and includes 14 case studies of how natural resources affect—or are affected by—conflict.

The authors of “On Population Growth Near Protected Areas” come to an opposite conclusion from Wittemyer et al., who found a pattern of higher population growth near protected areas in Africa and Latin America. “To understand the disagreement, we re-analyzed the protected areas in Wittemyer et al.’s paper. Their results are simply artifacts of mixing two incompatible datasets,” write the authors. “Protected areas may experience unusual population pressures near their edges; indeed, individual case studies provide examples. There is no evidence, however, of a general pattern of disproportionate population growth near protected areas.”

“The President and I agreed to a new initiative that will further cross-border cooperation on environmental protection and environmental security,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, announcing plans for a U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue.

Scientists at Purdue University have teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive map of U.S. CO2 emissions.

Mark Weston, who writes for the Global Dashboard blog, posted an edited version of a recent talk he gave on West African demography and security.

“Climate change is an important issue that can be addressed by all three elements of the national security equation: defense, diplomacy, and development,” says Kent Butts, in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Kent Butts, professor of political-military strategy at the Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College, makes the case for considering global climate change a nontraditional threat to security and discusses how the U.S. military is reacting to a changing climate.