Environmental Peacebuilding: 2021 in Review

Jan 11, 2022 | Environmental Peacebuilding Association

Do you remember January 1, 2021? We were so happy to have 2020 in the rear view mirror.  We were all exhausted, and hopeful for the new year.  Vaccines seemed imminent.  Change was in the air. I do not know how it is possible, but it seemed that 2021 was even longer, more intense than 2020.  While 2020 seemed like a dumpster fire, 2021 was more akin to a roller coaster.

Through the ups, downs, and curves, the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and Community of Practice continued to grow, engage, and coalesce.  The Road to Geneva brought together voices from around the world to address a range of environmental peacebuilding tools, experiences, and challenges.  Planning for the Second International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding has overtaken the Road to Geneva, and we have more than 300 speakers confirmed (20% more than all the people that attended the First Conference.  Notably, preparations for the Second Conference have included the development of a number of practical initiatives designed to improve the understanding and practice of environmental peacebuilding.  These include, among others, an emerging toolkit on monitoring and evaluation of environmental peacebuilding, a white paper on the future of environmental peacebuilding, an environmental peacebuilding mentorship initiative, an environmental peacebuilding arts repository, and a flagship report on frontier technologies for environmental peacebuilding, among others.  [Stay tuned for more information on the launch of a peer-reviewed journal on Environment & Security.]

The Association has continued to grow (now, with members in 70 countries), and we anticipate that the Conference will drive further growth.  The Interest Groups are undertaking a range of activities from webinars and skills-building events to toolkits and flagship reports.  In late 2021, we conveyed the Seventh Al Moumin Award for Environmental Peacebuilding on Patricia Gualinga, an inspiring environmental defender. The tally is all the more impressive when one considers that the Association has yet to celebrate our fourth anniversary. 

As a field, environmental peacebuilding continues to evolve.  Research, advocacy, and practice continue to diversify and deepen.  Climate change is a major area of focus, but efforts on land, forests, water, mining, and other sectors continues to grow.  Robust analysis of experiences and data is giving us a more complete understanding of the contexts, approaches, and effectiveness of those approaches. 

There are causes for concern.  The failure to date to effectively address climate change has brought us to a precipice where long-predicted conflicts may be driven by catastrophic changes to the ecosystems upon which we depend for food, water, energy, and livelihoods. Contestation over territory (often rich in resources, such as oil, water, and fisheries) has grown in Ukraine, the Himalayas, and the South China Sea, among others.  The seemingly settled armed conflict in Colombia is destabilizing.  Kazakhstan is erupting. 

These ongoing dynamics mean that environmental peacebuilding remains as relevant as ever.  Moreover, our understanding of the effectiveness of particular approaches is improving. 

I expect that 2022 will continue to be a challenging time.  I also expect that we will continue to develop ways to navigate in a world shaped by COVID, climate change, and conflict.  We will also continue to build the Association, the Community of Practice, and the field to navigate these challenges and make environment a cause for peace. 

Carl Bruch

President, Environmental Peacebuilding Association

Editor’s Note

In 2021, EnPAx has continued to improve and expand upon its programming efforts. In addition to its featured pages on COVID-19 and Gender, Natural Resources, Climate, and Peace, EnPAx was proud to establish featured pages on Frontier Technologies for Environmental Peacebuilding and Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) as it continues to search for and develop innovative tools and solutions for environmental peacebuilding. EnPAx’s M&E Interest Group currently has efforts underway to create an M&E Toolkit for Environmental Peacebuilding. 2021 also saw the initial development of an Arts Repository for Environmental Peacebuilding, an initiative to explore how art can inform, celebrate, and teach environmental peacebuilding scholarship and practice – to be formally launched at the Second International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding.

Climate change and its impacts on conflict was a dominating theme throughout 2021. Reports continue to indicate the stress that the impacts of climate change have on military and security services worldwide. There have been efforts to address the climate-conflict nexus in the United Nations Security Council and integrate climate security with the UN’s conflict-prevention strategies. While it is becoming clear that the Security Council understands the threat that climate change poses on global security, the efforts to formally address it are not yet fully realized.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 became one of the year’s top stories. While already struggling with the environmental effects of climate change, the sudden shift in governance created greater uncertainty for the future of Afghanistan’s resource projects. The lasting strength of livelihoods for Afghanistan’s civil society – particularly in agriculture and the ability of women to participate in the workforce – has been cast in doubt even as the country had made efforts to diversify its economy away from narcotics and the growing of poppy towards the lucrative cultivation of crops such as saffron. In a similar vein, after the February 2021 coup of Myanmar’s democratic government by its military junta, the exploitation of Myanmar’s vast natural resource wealth has created challenges in its mining sector, driven illegal logging and deforestation throughout the state, and displaced thousands of its citizens.

As 2021 comes to a close, we hope you have enjoyed all of the selections offered through our Knowledge Platform. I have had the pleasure of serving as Editor of the Environmental Peacebuilding Update since 2015 and as Executive Coordinator of EnPAx since its incorporation in 2018. EnPAx is a small, volunteer-run, global organization with a dedicated team of contributors bringing to you the latest environmental peacebuilding initiatives, publications, news, job opportunities, events, and opinions from the field. Each of the pieces we publish to our website are carefully compiled, curated, and coded to ensure that the most relevant, interesting, and noteworthy developments in environmental peacebuilding are accessible to our community. We are grateful to receive submissions to the Knowledge Platform from both EnPAx Members and members of the Environmental Peacebuilding Community of Practice and are delighted to meet and discover emerging voices for environmental peacebuilding. A welcomed addition to our Library offerings and EP Update has been the recurring “Olive Shoot” podcast from Elsa Barron, a current EnPAx Member and former EnPAx volunteer contributor. To view this podcast as well as all of the other noteworthy selections of 2021, we invite you to visit our Archive of Updates.

We at EnPAx sincerely thank all our Members, volunteers, contributors, and supporters for helping us have another positive and productive year of building the Association and Community of Practice. As Editor of the Update, I humbly thank all of our dedicated readers for tuning in to the newsletter every other week. I hope that you have as much enjoyment from reading the Environmental Peacebuilding Update as we do from publishing it.

Looking forward to seeing you throughout 2022!

Joel Young

Editor, Environmental Peacebuilding Update