Conservation for Peace: Perspectives of Environmental Peacebuilders in Liberia and Timor-Leste

May 1, 2015 | Brittany Ajroud and Janet Edmond
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Environmental peacebuilding is an emerging field of practice that responds to the needs of the many remote, biodiverse communities around the world that struggle to prevent or mitigate conflicts over natural resources. Between 1950 and 2000, 118 of 146 conflicts (81 percent) took place wholly or partially within biodiversity hotspots. About 40 percent of violent interstate conflicts in 2009 were linked to natural resources (UNEP 2012). Conservation International (CI) is an international conservation organization dedicated to empowering societies to care for nature, global biodiversity, and the well-being of humanity in a responsible and sustainable manner. CI’s environmental peacebuilders engage with local communities and institutions to restore societal cohesion, conserve the environment, and protect dwindling natural resources—often in countries with weak governance, social divides, and ongoing insecurity and violence.

Effective and inclusive natural resource management stimulates livelihoods and economic recovery, while serving broader goals like enabling reconciliation processes and strengthening government effectiveness and transparency. According to the Environmental Peacebuilding Working Group, environmental peacebuilding integrates natural resource management into conflict: prevention, mitigation, resolution, and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by conflict. Environmental peacebuilding creates a space for dialogue around the points of tension and fosters collaborative decision-making over natural resources in critically threatened ecosystems. Yet for environmental peacebuilding to be impactful, conservation practitioners must first understand the dynamics of local conflict.