How Climate Change Can Help Heal Conflicts—Not Just Fuel Them
Publisher: National Geographic
Author(s): Peter Schwartzstein
Date: 2022
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Cooperation, Governance, Land, Programming, Renewable Resources
For years, pastoralists in northern Senegal had been at each other’s throats. They tussled over prime pasture for their livestock, particularly as the rains repeatedly failed and desert vegetation shriveled. They competed for space and time at watering holes. In 2017, after a herder was murdered and tit-for-tat animal killings began to proliferate, AVSF, an agricultural NGO with a local presence, decided enough was enough.
It recruited a representative from each village in the area and established a “pastoral unit,” now one of 25 across Senegal. And through that forum the local leaders were able to agree on maximum herd numbers, their placement, and compensation for farmers in the event of damage to their fields.
This is a variation of so-called environmental peacebuilding (EP) in action, and across the world increasing numbers of NGOs, governments, and conflict resolution groups are using it to tackle spiraling environmental woes and instability—especially instances that combine the two.
Several years on, and despite worsening climate shocks, herders around Younouféré say there are now fewer disputes and less systematic overgrazing than there have been for years. “Life is still hard, but we’ve found that we can provide for most people and protect the land with better coordination,” says Demboi Sow, a Younouféré village elder. “I think we would have been slaughtering each other without this mediation.”
EP 101
Amid mounting awareness of climate and the environment’s capacity to both fuel violence and suffer from it, EP’s champions insist that the natural world can help bring people together every bit as much as it is tearing them apart: Think of it as the optimistic flip side of climate-related violence.
In wonkish terms, environmental peacebuilding describes the full spectrum of ways in which environmental issues can be harnessed to prevent, reduce, resolve, and recover from conflict. That can mean everything from securing access to farmland for former fighters who might otherwise return to violence, to rebuilding the rule of law after a conflict by training judges to better decide environmental cases.
At its heart, though, EP is grounded in the notion that if warring parties share concerns about their environment and resources, that can be a way to build trust, creating momentum for more cooperation down the line.
The appeal, peacebuilders say, is obvious. “When communities are angry with each other, they won’t talk. In those circumstances cooperation is hard,” Samba Samba Dia, an AVSF community representative, explains. “But when people’s jobs depend on the good health of the environment, well, then, they can find a way to work for all of their benefit.”
Parts of this concept aren’t wholly new, and parts have been tried and stress tested at the highest level. Even at the height of the Cold War, officials understood that they might be able to engage with hostile powers on the environment, which was perceived as a uniquely “soft” subject, when they would cooperate on little else. From the late 1990s onwards, conservationists in southern Africa and South America created about a dozen cross-border “peace parks,” which helped transform once violently disputed areas into nature preserves.