Textbook for Massive Open Online Course on "Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace"

Publisher: ELI and UN Environment

Date: 2019

This textbook accompanies the massive open online course (MOOC) on Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace. Conflicts over natural resources and the environment pose some of the greatest challenges in 21st century geopolitics, presenting serious threats to human security at the local, national, and international levels. Nonetheless, natural resources and the environment can serve as a vehicle for peace if managed in a sustainable and equitable manner. Consequently, environmental peacebuilding has emerged as a new frontier in interdisciplinary studies. It offers a conceptual and operational framework to understand the positive peacebuilding potential of natural resources across the conflict lifecycle while mitigating potential risks.  This MOOC provides an introduction to the multiple roles that natural resources and the environment play in the onset, escalation, resolution of, and recovery from violent conflicts. Many of the considerations and approaches presented in this course are also relevant to understanding and addressing social conflicts around natural resources and the environment.