What are the links between environmental injustice and violent conflict? How could climate change affect conflict-prone fragile states? This paper notes that unfair levels of access to natural resources (such as land and water) can contribute to poverty, marginalisation, and violent conflict. Linking adaptation and conflict-sensitive and peacebuilding agendas in conflict-prone fragile states can help to ensure that the rights of those most adversely affected by climate change are protected. The integration of conflict-sensitive and peacebuilding approaches into climate change adaptation strategies is required.
The quest for environmental justice is an integral part of social justice, human rights, and the promotion of peace. Climate change and its adverse consequences add a new dimension to links between violent conflict and the environment. Distribution-based conflicts arise, in part, from poor state policies to ensure equitable access to resources. Grievances over unfair access to resources combined with other social, cultural, economic or political factors can lead to violent conflict.
The equitable management of natural resources and the prevention of environmental degradation, resource exploitation, and resource competition, is particularly challenging in fragile states with weak institutional capacity. The effects of global warming such as increased drought and unpredictable precipitation, in addition to existing environmental degradation, is expected to increase the pressure on fragile state systems and on local communities’ resilience.
In conflict-prone fragile states, adaptation strategies themselves can inadvertently contribute to social tensions. For example, outbreaks of violent conflict in northern Kenya show that simply increasing agricultural production in arid and semi-arid regions to increase food security could cause tensions if pastoralists’ needs for grazing land and access to water are not considered. A conflict-sensitive perspective is therefore important.
Adaptation programmes and policies also have the potential to enhance peacebuilding, however:
- Adaptation efforts could support peace by enabling communities to increase their resilience to climate hazards and could help to build the capacity of both communities and the state
- Adaptation could promote social justice, human rights and gender equality by ensuring that initiatives are accessible and responsive to the needs of women and men in vulnerable and marginalised communities
- Environmental issues, including climate change, could mobilise antagonists to work together to address a common threat.
More needs to be done to engage conflict-analysis and peacebuilding practitioners in climate change adaptation discourses. The peacebuilding community in turn needs to be more proactive in engaging in adaptation work. Recommendations include the following:
- Integrate adaptation into poverty reduction and peacebuilding frameworks including National Adaptation Plans of Actions (NAPAs) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
- Include conflict analysis in Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) and Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) in fragile states, and consider specific impacts brought on by climate change, such as by undertaking adaptation assessments.
- Include consideration of environmental impacts on vulnerable women and men in peacebuilding and early recovery policies and programmes. Seek to strengthen the adaptive capacities of states and local communities.
- Include in conflict early warning and fragile states policies assessment of additional risks posed to vulnerable communities in specific conflict-prone countries by the impacts of climate change.
- Integrate lessons on conflict-sensitive development into adaptation programmes in conflict-prone countries.
