Carl Bruch

Director, International Programs
Environmental Law Institute

May 22, 2018

Carl Bruch is the Director of International Programs at the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and founding president of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. After studying physics, mathematics, and anthropology as undergraduate, he earned a Master’s degree in physics and a J.D. He joined ELI in 1997 and in partnership with the UN Environment Programme, he established the Environmental Peacebuilding Knowledge Platform, the Environmental Peacebuilding Community of Practice, and the biweekly Environmental Peacebuilding Update.

Carl is passionate about exploring the linkages between environment, conflict, and peace. He began looking at the effects of armed conflict on the environment early in his career, when ELI was engaged to assess the state of legal, scientific, and economic tools for addressing environmental damage from war. This work led to a book that he edited with Jay Austin, The Environmental Consequences of War (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Following that, Carl also conducted research on the use of the international law of pillage to address trade in conflict resources to finance armed conflict. 

Another major thread of Carl’s work focuses on post-conflict peacebuilding and natural resource management. While working on a track II diplomacy effort around water governance in the Euphrates and Tigris basin, Carl and Mikiyasu Nakayama (of the University of Tokyo) realized that there was a crucial gap in knowledge about how to manage natural resources after an armed conflict. This led to a six-volume set of books on post-conflict peacebuilding and natural resource management, with 150 chapters by 225 authors totaling 3900 pages (Routledge, 2012-2016). Carl describes, “That unprecedented body of learning on environment and peacebuilding was the initial foundation for the Environmental Peacebuilding Knowledge Platform and Community of Practice.” The books and Knowledge Platform led to the creation of a massive open online course (MOOC) on Environmental Security & Sustaining Peace, which ran in Spring 2018 with more than 10,000 practitioners, scholars, and students in 150 countries enrolled. In addition to his research, Carl has worked on environment, conflict, and peace in more than a dozen conflict-affected countries.

Environmental peacebuilding provides an overarching conceptual framework for understanding linkages between environment, conflict, and peace across time, geographies, and different resources.  Carl is excited by the many areas for further development: “Environmental peacebuilding is so exciting because it’s so new. There are so many big questions that need theoretical research, data, and testing—it is a problem-rich environment or a target-rich environment, depending on how you look at it!” Carl is particularly enthusiastic about the new Environmental Peacebuilding Association, which he sees as central to bringing people together to solve the pressing challenges at the intersection of environment, conflict and peace.