Tag Archives: Environmental issues

Risk, But Also Opportunity in Climate Fragility and Terror Link

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This article was first published by newsecuritybeat.org.

In a recent article for New Security Beat, Colin Walch made the case that the abandonment of some communities in Mali to deal with climate change on their own has created “fertile ground” for jihadist recruitment. In a similar argument, Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger in a report for adelphi asserted last month that “large-scale environmental and climatic change contributes to creating an environment in which [non-state armed groups] can thrive and opens spaces that facilitate the pursuit of their strategies.”

These are important findings and relevant studies that point to the multifaceted security risks that result from climate change. They moreover confirm that climate change does not act as a cause of violence, but as a meaningful threat multiplier. But, as I recently argued during a Wilson Center discussion, we also need to move beyond a singular focus on risk.

We need to put opportunity and peace back at the center of environmental peace and conflict research and practice. In fragile states, we need to strengthen our efforts to identify the potential that climate action has to overcome fragility and improve people’s lives, not just focus on threats. This requires both a better understanding of what works on the ground and clear global leadership.

What Works?

So what builds peace? This was a core question during the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development this spring during discussions about the Sustainable Development Goals, also known as “Agenda 2030,” and how they relate to peace and conflict. The answer from panelists was unanimous: include local communities in the development processes.

The evidence base for the effect of significant local involvement in climate, development, and peacebuilding projects is substantial. Recent research that pays close attention to the links between socioeconomic, political, as well as ecological processes offers valuable pathways for climate action that could address the threats to people’s livelihoods that terror groups exploit in order to bolster recruitment.

We need to move beyond a singular focus on risk

As Walch persuasively shows for Mali, it is the breaking down of local institutional structures that provides opportunities for jihadist recruitment. Research by myself in Nepal, as well as Prakash Kashwan in India, Tanzania, and Mexico, shows that good climate mitigation policies can also build such institutions up, or at least help in the emergence of new local governance structures.

In Nepal, I tested whether the provision of environmental services helps in the facilitation of the peace process after civil war. Looking specifically at climate-sensitive small hydropower projects designed to bring electricity to rural villages, this research showed not only substantial socio-economic successes – e.g. regarding empowerment for women, better access to education, and increased economic opportunities – but an increase in community cohesion and strengthening of local governance structures. The results indicate that climate policies can play an important role in facilitating the growth of local institutions and addressing peoples’ vulnerability and fragility (even if, as in this case, it was somewhat unintentional and raises other political issues).

Likewise, Kashwan shows in his recent book, Democracy in the Woods, that REDD+ forest policies in India, Tanzania, and Mexico depend on the inclusion of local communities to be successful. He argues that “when local people do not benefit, forest conservation efforts tend to be unsustainable.” He moreover points to the important role of institutional architecture and what he terms “mechanisms of intermediation” – that is, venues that help citizen groups, civil society organizations, and social movements engage in political and policy processes.

Kashwan lays out the argument that national leaders and dominant political parties that must compete for popular support are more likely to fashion local interventions that pursue conservation of forested landscapes without violating the rights of forest-dependent people than leaders and political parties that are not accountable to constituents.

This may seem somewhat intuitive, but it has important implications for local governance structures. Kashwan argues that state and non-state agencies, including international agencies, can foster and reinforce the responsiveness of government by strengthening the skills of community groups and civil society organizations at the local level. As their capacities for organization and advocacy improve, they are able to better represent their concerns, including during negotiation over natural resource rights, as in the case of inter-ethnic grievances in Mali.

Are We Ready for Yes?

This research offers valuable examples that climate action can mitigate not only the effects of climate change, but have wider impacts that deliver positive returns in all manner of ways, like reducing the opportunity for terrorist groups to recruit vulnerable and marginalized people to their cause.

Climate action can deliver broader positive returns

As SIPRI’s Malin Mobjörk and Dan Smith argue, “this requires clear leadership and explicit institutional change strategies” at the highest levels. For example, as Camilla Born from E3G argues, by providing an institutional home for climate security issues at the United Nations.

At all levels, it is imperative that we emphasize the positive potential of sustainable policies beyond risk assessments, especially for fragile states, where there will always be risks, but great opportunity too. The Environment Strategy of the United Nations Department of Field Support, published in April 2017, points in the right direction as it encourages UN peacekeeping operations “to seek a positive long-term legacy through the development of specific environment-related projects that may benefit societies and ecosystems over the long term.”

The new UN field support policy, the Sustainable Development Goals, the recent  Security Council initiative in the Lake Chad region, and new Secretary-General António Guterres’ emphasis on climate change all raise hope that global governance bodies are realizing the significant threat of climate change and increasingly moving on to the next question: What works? The research, policy, and practice communities need to be ready with answers.

Florian Krampe, PhD, is a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in the Climate Change and Risk Project. He specializes in peace and conflict research, international relations, and political ecology. Follow him on Twitter @FlorianKrampe.

Sources: adelphi, Conflict, Security & Development, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Global Environmental Politics, Prakash Kashwan (2017), Elinor Ostrom (2015), Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, United Nations.

Photo Credit: A farm in Mali, August 2013, courtesy of Curt Carnemark/World Bank.

New article in The Lancet Global Health

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Avoiding catastrophes: seeking synergies among the public health, environmental protection, and human security sectors

Global health catastrophes have complex origins, often rooted in social disruption, poverty, conflict, and environmental collapse. Avoiding them will require a new integrative analysis of the links between disease, armed conflict, and environmental degradation within a socioecological vulnerability and human security context.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(16)30173-5/abstract

Empowering peace: service provision and state legitimacy in Nepal’s peace-building process

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My new article Empowering peace: service provision and state legitimacy in Nepal’s peace-building process got just published in the journal Conflict, Security and Development:

There is growing demand for an understanding of peace beyond the absence of violence. As such research focuses increasingly on the issue of state legitimacy as a tool to assess and understand peace processes. In this paper the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is studied to assess whether the provision of services like electricity to rural communities of war-torn countries through state actors contributes to the consolidation of the post-war political system. The qualitative analysis of two localities in post-war Nepal highlights that service provision in the form of electricity through micro-hydropower yields tremendously positive socio-economic effects for rural communities. However, socio-economic development in combination with interactions among villagers has strengthened local autonomy through emphasising alternative local governance structures. This highlights that the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is more complex than previous research anticipates. The absence of a positive effect on state legitimacy raises the question of whether in its current case-specific form service provision is conducive to the broader peace-building efforts in post-war Nepal, because it stresses the divide between state and society.

Krampe, F. (2016). Empowering peace: service provision and state legitimacy in Nepal’s peace-building process. Conflict, Security & Development, 16(1), 53–73.

On the Anthropocene, Nature, and the end of Conservation?!

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The Earth at night, a composited night-time image of the world during the anthropocene.

The Earth at night, a composited night-time image of the world during the anthropocene.
Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC.

Uppsala, Sweden | 18 August 2014 | by Florian Krampe

When I first learned about the concept of the anthropocene from my friend and colleague Gerald Roche, the topic intrigued me as much as it confused me. In this post I want to share some reflections that this concept triggered. I do not claim that these are correct. These are my thoughts and I am happy to be advised otherwise and am interested in your comments and challenges to this initial reading and reflection on the concept of the anthropocene and its implications.

You never go back
Frankly, initially I contested the concept. How can humans cause a shift in a geological epoch? Doesn’t it require something much bigger – more volatile – to change geology?

The Encyclopedia of Earth defines the Anthropocene as “Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.” Having studied climate change in relation to peace and conflict for some years now, I could not object to this statement. The anthropocene had caught me! And once you accept that earth as such – not in parts, but in entirety – is affected by humans, you do not look at the landscape around you the same way ever again. I remember something similar after reading Foucault – you simply do not look at the world as you did before.

“Nature” becomes manipulated by humans – by design and accident. Effectively, you start searching for it: Forests? All I see is forestation. Even untouched territories are defined by their lack of human influence. Rivers? You start to realise how many of them are, in fact, river and flood management not to speak of “renaturation”.

Nowhere did this become clearer to me than on a recent trip to France (having grown up in the industrial heart land of Germany “nature” was anyway often far away). All of a sudden the hills of Provence and the Cote d’Azur were nothing other than the result of centuries of human impact. Circles of farming and deforestation going hand in hand to fuel the growth of the big city. Nature?

The death of “nature”?
The inevitable question that came to my mind after thinking about the anthropocene and the shift in our understanding of the world became inevitably: where does this leave nature?! When everything today is effected by human activity, than nature – defined as “the physical world and everything in it (such as plants, animals, mountains, oceans, etc.) that is not made by people” – does not exist. It simply vanishes! 

Conservation a meaningless tautology?
The logic of the anthropocene is simple and extremely powerful. And as I say, once you accept the principle you will have difficulties looking at the world in the same way again. But what does that mean for our policies directed towards nature? In short, with the realisation that humans carried the world into the geological epoch of the anthropocene, among other things, conservation dies as well. If nature does not exist, conservation can no longer be about the protection of nature.

In fact, doesn’t it simply become the alteration and manipulation of the anthropogenic face of the earth in the way that environmentally cautious politicians and conservationists believe that it resembles nature? A fictional vision of the face of the earth without human activity? Strongly put, if we think of our world in terms of the anthropocene, don’t nature and conservation become a meaningless tautology?!

Nepal’s Micro-Hydropower Projects Have Surprising Effect on Peace Process

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nepal_river1

Riverside village in Nepal’s Baglung District, Nepal.

by Florian Krampe | published 14 May 2014, New Security Beats. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment, which has been rolling out in stages since last September, confirms a crucial divide in current climate thinking: efforts to adapt and mitigate to climate change are often considered separately from the vulnerability of people.

Climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability were covered by IPCC Working Group II, while Working Group III handled mitigation. Each group developed and released their reports separately. Why is this significant? Because in conflict and post-conflict societies, climate mitigation efforts can have significant impacts on existing tensions, sometimes even making them worse. It is therefore vitally important that policymakers understand these two sets of issues together and researchers build a better understanding of how they interact.

The Climate-Peacebuilding Nexus

Environmental issues in post-conflict societies have been paid more attention recently, as development and climate researchers and practitioners increasingly focus on the poor and vulnerable segments of society. This has been accompanied with a shift in the security community from a focus on state to human security. These changes have led to a higher profile for environmental issues in many post-conflict peacebuilding policies (e.g., Afghanistan).

While this is an important step to thinking about environmental issues and peacebuilding efforts together, research on the nexus of climate change adaptation and mitigation and their consequences for peacebuilding is almost nonexistent (an exception that looks closer at human security being the recent Wilson Center report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation). How are our efforts to reduce the impact of climate change affecting post-conflict societies? In an attempt to add to this body of knowledge, I recently looked at the development of micro-hydropower systems in Nepal and assessed whether they contribute to building peace.

Read the full article at newsecuritybeats.org.

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