State of the World 2005 Global Security Brief #6: Promoting Environmental Cooperation as a Peace-Building Tool

Environmental degradation triggers intense social conflict that is sometimes accompanied by violence. Pollution, natural resource depletion, and the rapid conversion of coastlines, wetlands, watersheds, and forests can have dramatically negative consequences for communities that depend on them for livelihoods and healthy environments. For example, the World Commission on Dams estimated that some 40-80 million people have been swept out of the way to make room for the world’s large dams. Environmental protection initiatives can also trigger conflict and controversy, particularly when local communities are not consulted about the terms of their access to natural systems targeted for conservation.

If environmental degradation can trigger conflict, controversy, and violence, then environmental cooperation initiatives have great potential as peacemaking tools. Why?

► The environment offers some useful, perhaps even unique, qualities that lend themselves to building peace and transforming conflict. For instance, environmental challenges ignore political boundaries, require a long-term perspective, encourage local and nongovernmental participation, and extend community building beyond polarizing economic linkages.

► Cross-border environmental cooperation is often difficult to achieve, whether the borders involved are sovereign boundaries between states or cultural, economic and political boundaries between different social groups. But where cooperation does take root across such boundaries, it may help to enhance trust, establish cooperative habits, create shared regional identities around shared resources, and establish mutually recognized rights and expectations.

► Environmental peacemaking involves using cooperative efforts to manage environmental resources as a way to transform insecurities and create more peaceful relations between parties in dispute. A growing array of initiatives around the world—including peace parks, shared river basin management plans, regional seas agreements, and joint environmental monitoring programs—are blending ecology and politics in the service of peace. As such initiatives become more frequent and gain momentum, they may transform both how people approach conflict and how they view the environment.

Recognizing the potentially critical linkages between environment and insecurity, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for integrating environmental contributions to conflict and instability into the U.N.’s conflict prevention strategy and the deliberations of his High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Surprisingly, however, relatively little is known about the best design for environmental peacemaking initiatives or the conditions under which they are most likely to succeed. While a large body of research examines environmental degradation’s contribution to violent conflict, little in the way of systematic scholarship evaluates the equally important possibility that environmental cooperation may bring peace. Nor have governments given scholars much to work with: recognition of environment-security linkages has been slow and uneven, and where initiatives have been started, follow-through and sustained support is often lacking. Without better knowledge and stronger commitment, the international community may be missing powerful peacemaking opportunities in the environmental domain.

One domain in which environmental peacemaking strategies have begun to take root is biodiversity conservation. Conservationists have long recognized that territorial borders could inhibit effective conservation programs. More recently, momentum has grown for the establishment of transboundary “peace parks” not only as conservation tools but also to promote international peace and understanding. A bitter territorial dispute between Peru and Ecuador was resolved in part by establishing a peace park along the border, and a similar proposal has been raised for sensitive border regions between India and Pakistan and on the Korean peninsula. Governments in Central America and Southern Africa—two world regions emerging from long periods of violent conflict—have been particularly determined to promote transboundary conservation initiatives as a way to enhance regional understanding and cooperation.

Another important arena for environmental peacemaking is shared water supplies. Growing water demand has fueled predictions that as much as half of the world’s population will live under conditions of water insecurity within the next few decades. Whether such scarcity will trigger violent conflicts over water remains unclear—doomsday “water war” scenarios have grown popular in the media, but often ignore the equally strong cooperative possibilities around shared water supplies. Several of the world’s major river basins, including the Nile, the Danube, the Indus, and the Jordan, have been the subject of cooperative negotiations among the governments sharing those rivers, with talks often cutting across otherwise-difficult political conflicts. The challenge will be to extend and deepen such cooperative processes more quickly than the growth of conflict potential from heightened water scarcity. As important will be transforming those processes from narrow talks about dividing water supplies into more comprehensive initiatives for shared basin governance and management, and from narrowly intergovernmental dialogues to broader processes that incorporate local communities and a wider range of stakeholders.

Although governments around the world are beginning to recognize the possibilities of using environmental initiatives as trust-building, conflict-transforming tools, much remains to be done. Several policy initiatives could help strengthen the peacemaking potential of environmental cooperation:

1. Enhance environmental initiatives in post-conflict settings. The United Nations Environment Programme has launched a post-conflict assessment initiative that has conducted valuable environmental assessments in a number of post-conflict settings, from Liberia to the Balkans to the occupied Palestinian territories. Environmental initiatives to restore clean water supplies, air quality, and green spaces could be a valuable stabilizing force and a useful confidence-building tool in war-torn societies. Staffing and funding for these initiatives should be strengthened, and greater support for local institution building as well as monitoring and assessment should be provided.
2. Link environmental aid programs with conflict resolution assistance. Although much remains to be done, foreign aid programs have grown more sensitive in recent years to the need to take considerations of environmental sustainability into account. Yet programs to promote sustainable management of forests, coastlines, watersheds, or agro-ecological systems typically have much stronger technical, economic, and managerial components than they do social and political. Even when sustainability criteria are strongly embraced, questions of who has access to livelihood resources and critical ecosystems can remain intensely conflictual. Enhancing the conflict-resolution components of development assistance is critical to promoting social as well as ecological sustainability.
3. Build and strengthen environmental conflict-resolution mechanisms at the international level. The Permanent Court of Arbitration, which was created more than a century ago as a vehicle for international arbitration and conciliation, observed recently that “Presently there is no unified forum to which States, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and private parties can have recourse when they have agreed to seek resolution of controversies concerning environmental protection, and conservation of natural resources.” Multi-stakeholder dialogue initiatives such as the World Commission on Dams also have an important role to play. Such initiatives have been most effective when they extend to the full range of stakeholders, particularly local community groups that typically lack voice at the international level, and when they work to build a shared knowledge foundation around contentious environmental issues.
4. Incorporate stronger roles for civil society organizations. Left to their own devices, governments and other powerful actors may view environmental cooperation as little more than opportunities for shared resource plunder—as in the case of international river-basin agreements that do little more than pave the way for international funding to dam, drain, and divert freshwater ecosystems. Much of the peacemaking potential around environmental problems lies in better dialogue directly among civil society groups and resource users across borders, requiring more effective mechanisms for stakeholder participation at all levels.
5. Ratify and strengthen existing international environmental agreements. International environmental cooperation has waned dramatically since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The United States in particular has taken several steps backward from its historic leadership role in this arena. The US has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol to the climate regime; has fought efforts to strengthen the Basel Convention on the hazardous waste trade; and has failed to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rotterdam Convention on trade in pesticides and hazardous chemicals, the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety, and the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants. The U.S. and other governments must renew their commitment to environmental multilateralism.

About the authors: Ken Conca is associate professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and director of the Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda. Alexander Carius is Director of Adelphi Research in Berlin. Geoffrey D. Dabelko is the director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.