From Climate Conflicts to Environmental Peacebuilding

Research has long studied whether climate change exacerbates the risks of violent conflict. Another research stream focuses on environmental peacebuilding as a way to prevent and resolve conflicts. A core idea of environmental peacebuilding is to consider environmental issues during peacebuilding processes and to encourage cooperation between conflict parties on environmental issues as a trust-building mechanism. So far, research has addressed both climate conflicts and environmental peacebuilding mostly separately.

A new special issue, published by the peer-reviewed Journal Environment and Security and co-edited by IFSH PhD fellow Anselm Vogler, brings both research traditions into dialogue. The special issue is titled “From climate conflicts to environmental peacebuilding.“ It contains innovative contributions on a broad range of themes. The contributions focus on the potential and challenges for environmental peacebuilding in Ukraine, the role of climate security risk assessments, and gender norms as factors in the climate conflict nexus. They demonstrate the importance of local communities in facilitating successful environmental peacebuilding projects, the influence of varying knowledge practices on environmental conflict, strategies to deescalate conflicts between climate-displaced populations and host communities, and the value of indigenous voices within the climate conflict and environmental peacebuilding nexus. The special issue was co-edited with Jan Sändig (University of Bayreuth), Natalia Dalmer (Leibniz University Hannover), and Tobias Ide (Murdoch University, Perth).