The Third Wave of Environmental Peacebuilding

Jan 26, 2021 | Richard Matthew and Tobias Ide
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For most of 2020, news, politics, policy, and research in the United States and abroad were dominated by the challenges posed by COVID-19, a rapidly unfolding global pandemic unprecedented in scale and cost. For much of the world, however, COVID-19 in fact competed with many other highly destructive events including a cascade of environmental disasters. Swarms of locusts pushed much of the Horn of Africa into or close to famine; 30 severe storms including Hurricanes Iota and Eta battered the Atlantic coasts; some 4 million acres of forest burned to the ground in California, doubling the previous high reached in 2018; typhoons ravaged the Philippines, floods overwhelmed parts of Indonesia, and many regions around the world experienced devastating heat waves. In addition to disaster patterns, the trends in violent state conflict were equally alarming, reaching their highest level since the end of World War II, according to a 2020 report on conflict trends from PRIO. In the most violent conflicts, in Syria and Yemen, the impacts of war have been amplified and complicated by the impacts of drought and years of environmental mismanagement.

Future projections provide little basis for optimism about where the world is headed. For example, among the many take-aways in the Ecological Threat Register released in 2020, as many as 1.2 billion people are now highly vulnerable to and could be displaced by climate change impacts in the next few decades. While such projections are fraught with uncertainty, the science informing them is clearer and more worrisome than ever. As the 2019 Global Environment Outlook notes, across the gamut of socioecological systems (atmosphere, land, water, oceans and biodiversity), we have reached or are closing in on irreversible levels of damage. The next IPCC report on impacts, due to be released in October 2021, will no doubt underscore the rapidly closing window for aggressive climate change action that might preserve an environment aligned with the needs and capabilities of both human and non-human species.

For some thirty years, researchers and practitioners have been studying, discussing, and acting to mitigate the complex interactions between environmental and climate change on the one hand, and human and national security on the other. Focusing on the challenges of, and opportunities for, environmental peacebuilding, a special issue of the journal International Affairs published this month takes stock of the achievements of some three decades of activity, identifies an emerging agenda for an issue that remains of critical importance, and introduces a new and global generation of scholars.