Environmental Peacebuilding Community of Practice Celebrates 6 Months of Growth
May 13, 2014
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ELI & UNEP
On May 6, 2014, the Environmental Peacebuilding Global Knowledge Platform and Community of Practice celebrated six months of dialogue and growth. Since its launch, the community of practice has expanded to more than 1500 members, including researchers, practitioners, and decision makers from around the world. The online knowledge platform has also grown rapidly during its first six months, as the library of resources on environmental peacebuilding has more than doubled in size to encompass 250 case studies, briefs, toolkits and other publications covering dozens of conflict-affected countries—with more being added every week.
We have worked to extend the community of practice through social media since January, hosting discussion forums on LinkedIn and disseminating information via Environmental Peacebuilding profiles on Twitter (@EnvPeacebuild) and Facebook. Our social media presence has grown to include over 250 followers on Twitter, 220 on LinkedIn, and over 150 on Facebook. Our LinkedIn group serves as a forum for moderated discussions between practitioners, researchers and others in the field, while we have used Twitter and Facebook to raise awareness and share news, events and research on environmental peacebuilding. The social media campaign to launch Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, the fourth book in our series on natural resource management in post-conflict countries, resulted in almost 8 million appearances of the #waterpeacebuilding hashtag on Twitter, reaching more than 3 million people.
In January, we inaugurated the Environmental Peacebuilding Update, a biweekly email newsletter distributed to members of the community of practice containing links to new publications, upcoming conferences, calls for papers, job opportunities, and selected international news from conflict-affected countries. The Update has recently expanded to include selected blogs and opinion pieces, and the 9th issue of the update was published this week.
Over the coming months, we plan to continue our outreach efforts in order to expand our community of practice and promote greater dialogue around environmental peacebuilding.
