Country-Level Conflict and Environmental Peacebuilding: Lessons and Opportunities

Date & Time
Jun 17, 2026 | 13.30 - 15.00

Participants
Charles Kelly, Independent (United States)

Recent conflicts between and within countries have involved significant losses of lives and wealth, human suffering, large scale environmental damage and significant challenges for environment-based peacebuilding. The Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships (HNPW) meetings in 2023, 2024 and 2025 held sessions on conflict and the environment. A session on conflict and peacebuilding was held at the 2024 Environmental Peacebuilding Conference. The progress of discussions across these sessions and the sector in general creates an opportunity to consider the lessons and opportunities identified for environmental peacebuilding during conflict going forward. The workshop will (1) review lessons from conflicts and peacebuilding collected during the 2025 HNPW session, (2) discuss these in relation types of country-level conflicts through sub-working group discussions, and (3) identify consensus-based opportunities for engaging environmental peacebuilding in country-level conflicts. The sub-working groups will be divided into different types of conflicts (see below), with each group provided a moderator. The workshop schedule will involve (1) 15 minutes for an introduction to the session and questions, (2) 45 minutes allocated to group work and (3) 30 minutes for reporting back by each of the working groups and further discussions. The workshop results will be assembled into a short report and circulated to the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. The tentative focus of the working groups will be on (1) Inter-Country Conflict (Ukraine-Russia), (2) Intra-country state-level conflict (Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen), (3) Intra-country non-state actor conflict (Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso) and (3) Multi-state conflict (West Asia: Isreal, Gaza/West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Qatar). As practical, a summary of lessons from the 2025 HNPW session will be shared with participants before the workshop.