Raising Climate Ambition Should Include Environmental Peacebuilding

May 17, 2021 | Elsa Barron and Sherri Goodman
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In January, the Biden Administration released the Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. It is a sweeping document that integrates climate concerns into policy and governance, including into national security. It recognizes that environmental security, the integration of environmental considerations into national security strategy, policy, and programs, is essential to combat the global climate crisis and should be mainstreamed across U.S. government efforts. The idea is not a new one. One of the authors (Goodman) led early environmental security efforts in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for 8 years of the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, during the first chapter of awareness of environmental considerations in defense and foreign policy.

Although it wasn’t a priority for the previous administration, environmental security is a field that has had a foothold in the U.S. government for more than three decades. After the Cold War, Department of Defense (DoD) environmental security initiatives became a priority. They included closing excess military bases and expediting environmental cleanup, engaging in the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation Program to reduce nuclear waste from decommissioned, Russian submarines and conducting high-level Mil-Mil Environmental Security engagements around the world through the Defense International Environmental Cooperation Program. These early government-led environmental security efforts focused on ameliorating environmental damages, creating opportunities for military-to-military engagements, and promoting U.S. leadership through multilateral collaboration.

Today, as we experience intensifying natural disasters at home and abroad, growing global demand for energy, increasing resource scarcity, climate-related migration, sea-level rise, pervasive drought, and more, the Biden administration should once again apply an environmental security lens to its engagement on climate. But it’s also time that the administration take up an environmental peacebuilding approach.

Environmental peacebuilding recognizes that cooperation over environmental issues can be a tool for building peace by both minimizing conflict related to natural resources (negative peace) and supporting the presence of peacebuilding practices, such as justice, integration, and opportunity (positive peace). Environmental initiatives can bring conflicting groups together or help to eliminate conditions of scarcity which fuel conflict. They can also help develop community cohesion, work towards just environmental conditions, and ensure opportunity for future generations.

By prioritizing human security, entering the international conversation softly, acting on longer time frames, practicing participatory processes at home and abroad, and promoting environmental justice, the Biden administration can apply a peacebuilding lens to its climate engagement. And with leadership from the top in the Biden administration, these priorities can become strategic pathways of building trust, peace, and security.