Adaptive Peacebuilding: Improving climate-related security risk management through real-time data and analysis
art by Victoria Nakada (Japan | USA)
Cedric de Coning (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs); Diego Osorio (Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies); Chaire Raoul Dandurand (Adler University); Frans Schapendonk, Grazia Pacillo, and Peter Laderach (CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security and Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT)
Adaptive peacebuilding copes with emerging climate-related security risks through iterative inductive experimentation and learning. This process can be enhanced by feeding the adaptive process with real-time data and analysis. Strengthening cooperation between peacebuilders and researchers studying climate change and its effects on social systems can improve the effectiveness of adaptive peacebuilding.
Context
Despite a growing number of high-level statements from the UN Security Council and heads of state, international efforts to maintain international peace and security have not sufficiently taken the effects of climate change into account.[i] One reason for this is the insufficient availability of empirical data and analysis to drive the systemic integration of climate security risks into adaptive peacebuilding decision-making.[ii]
In the coming decades, climate change will increasingly undermine international efforts to prevent conflict and sustain peace and will make peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian responses more complex and costly. The result will be conflicts that last longer, cause more suffering, and disrupt development.[iii] Tools that help to generate robust, localized, and real-time data and analysis will generate the evidence-base needed to drive climate-sensitive adaptive peacebuilding. More cooperation will be needed between researchers and practitioners in the fields of climate change, social-ecological systems, peacebuilding, and security policy to develop and refine the methods needed to improve climate-related security risk management.[iv]
What’s been done
Efforts to integrate climate security risks into peace programming remain limited and ad hoc. For example, an assessment of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) concluded that the Mission lacks the capacity to sufficiently monitor and integrate such risks, despite the salience of climate-related factors in Mali.[v] A more institutionalized climate security-sensitive conflict resolution framework informed by localized and real-time climate security evidence could inform a more integrated approach in which the drivers of climate-related insecurity are systematically incorporated.
One exception is the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), which has since 2017-2018 experimented with a more integrated response to climate security risks. This included coordinating drought responses through the Drought Operations Coordination Centres and the Recovery and Resilience Framework. UNSOM’s work in this area has been boosted by the deployment of an Environmental Security Advisor.[vi] Sadly, the UNSOM example is still the exception, but it serves as a proof of concept for the need to consider how climate insecurities overlap and sustain other forms of insecurity.
The good news is that several tools to improve the integration of climate data and analysis into adaptive peacebuilding are under development. Some seek to improve early warning assessments with the aim of integrating climate fragility risks into planning processes. Others focus on climate fragility mapping to identify where climate stress and shocks are likely to occur.[vii] As the climate security interface in any given location is constantly shifting, with both ecological and social systems continuously co-evolving, these tools need to be highly adaptive. Tools also need to take into consideration how the presentation of data and analysis can help (or hinder) the integration of climate-related security risks across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, and importantly also transcend global-local and formal-informal divides.
Looking ahead
One set of tools responding to the need for rapid, real-time, but also accessible data and evidence is the Climate Security Crisis Observatory (CSCO), one of the game-changing solutions proposed in Action Track 5 of the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus. The CSCO is being developed by CGIAR in partnership with stakeholders across Latin and Central America, Africa, and South-East Asia. The CSCO aims to provide real-time, inter-disciplinary analysis to generate policy-relevant climate-related security information at the regional, national, and sub-national level. Reducing the time between data collection, analysis, and the presentation of evidence-based climate-related security risk information can increase the adaptive capacity of peace and security decision-making mechanisms.
For example, a symbiotic interface between climate security-sensitive support tools and the adaptive peacebuilding programme cycle can mutually enhance research and inform decision-making. Social and ecological systems are inseparably linked and form complex adaptive systems active across multiple spatial and temporal scales. As their dynamics are non-linear and emergent, their future behaviour is inherently uncertain. It also means that the exact outcomes of any intervention cannot be predicted. The best way to cope with this complexity is to experiment and continuously adapt to incorporate the feedback and knowledge generated from that experimentation. The two key operational factors of adaptive peacebuilding are variation—in the form of experimenting with multiple parallel interventions—and selection, through which effective interventions are selected, replicated, and scaled-up.[viii] This process enables practitioners to make use of real-time data and analysis to improve the monitoring of peacebuilding interventions in climate-sensitive and conflict-prone contexts.[ix] It can be enhanced by increasing knowledge exchanges and establishing a transparent environment in which setbacks are seen as learning opportunities that drive adaptation.[x]
An important element of adaptive peacebuilding is the recognition that the emergence of resilient self-organizing social institutions is a prerequisite for self-sustaining peace. The active participation of the affected community and society in all stages of the adaptive process is therefore critical. Adaptive peacebuilding needs to be informed, shaped, and sustained by the knowledge and goals of the affected community. International partners can support these efforts by sharing networks, resources, comparative knowledge of other systems, and process facilitation.
[i] Krampe, F. (2019) SIPRI Policy Brief: Climate Change, Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace. Solna: SIPRI.
[ii] Dress, A., Fischhendler, I., Nielsen, J. and Zikos, D. (2019) ‘Environmental Peacebuilding: Towards a Theoretical Framework’, Cooperation and Conflict, 54(1): 99-119; Ide, T. (2019) ‘The Impact of Environmental Cooperation on Peacemaking: Definitions, Mechanisms, and Empirical Evidence’, International Studies Review, 21(3): 327-346.
[iii] Matthew, R. and Hammill, A. (2013) ‘Peacebuilding and Adaptation to Climate Change’, in Jensen, D. and Lonergan, S. (eds). Assessing and Restoring Natural Resources in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding. London: Earthscan.
[iv] Tänzler, D., Rüttinger, L. and Scherer, N. (2018) ‘Building Resilience by Linking Climate Change Adaptation, Peacebuilding, and Conflict Prevention’, Planetary Security Initiative Policy Brief, Berlin: adelphi.
[v] Hegazi, F., Krampe, F. and Smith, E. (2021) Climate-related Security Risks and Peacebuilding in Mali, Solna: SIPRI.
[vi] Eklöw, K. and Krampe, F. (2019) Climate-related Security Risks and Peacebuilding in Somalia, Solna: SIPRI.
[vii] UNEP, EU, adelphi (2019) Toolbox. Addressing Climate-fragility Risks: Linking Peacebuilding, Climate Change Adaptation, and Sustainable Livelihoods.
[ix] De Coning, C. (2018) ‘Adaptive Peacebuilding’, International Affairs, 94(2): 301-317.
[x] Eklöw, K. and Krampe, F. (2019) Climate-related Security Risks and Peacebuilding in Somalia.