Addressing Climate-Related Security Risks: Leveraging the digital transformation for integrated climate and conflict-sensitive policy, programme and business
art by Victoria Nakada (Japan | USA)
Albert Martinez (United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP); Alejandro Martín Rodríguez (UNEP and European External Action Service); Ji Won Bang (Planet)
Emerging earth observation and artificial intelligence technologies could revolutionize environmental peacebuilding if policy makers can harness the right skills and public-private partnerships.
Context
The future of environmental peacebuilding needs to be reconsidered. Many international actors acknowledge climate-related security risks in their latest policies[i] but translation into peacebuilding practice is challenging. Peacebuilding interventions often lack climate adaptation, and climate change adaptation programmes fail to incorporate peacebuilding goals. Consequently, siloed responses cannot match the speed and spread of climate-related security risks.
Is it possible to solve future climate and conflict challenges with environmental peacebuilding approaches from the past? A profound structural transformation is needed where the digital revolution catalyses a ‘digital by default’ analysis and monitoring of climate and conflict and supports policymaking and integrated programming with cross-sectoral expertise. This transformation should feature an interdisciplinary approach that ensures that conflict prevention and mediation efforts are climate-sensitive, and that climate projects are conflict-sensitive.
To address climate-related security risks, the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have jointly developed novel integrated environmental peacebuilding approaches to strengthen social trust and resilience to conflict. Climate-conflict analysis based on mixed field and Earth Observation (EO) methods formed the basis of the project. This used remote sensing technologies to gather information on the socio-economic aspects of the local communities in the area, as well as their environmental systems, to enhance the understanding of climate-related security risks.
Opportunities to implement similar projects are now on the horizon. Instruments such as the EU’s billion-euro development budget which require interventions in fragile countries to be based on solid and comprehensive conflict analysis, represent perfect entry-points for conflict- and climate-sensitive action that could serve as a model to be replicated by other institutions. To advance these programmes, new technologies must be leveraged appropriately.
What’s been done
Integrated conflict and climate analysis are increasingly used in environmental peacebuilding. They rely on new technologies that leverage cross-disciplinary data and insights to understand the security impacts of climate change on human systems.[ii] There is a critical barrier that prevents the successful leveraging of these technologies in practice: their complexity requires technical skills and infrastructure. In fact, the rapid development and proliferation of digital technologies are leaving many people behind in what is becoming known as the ‘Digital Divide’.
Frontier technological advances have been possible as businesses embraced social and environmental impact-driven purposes. This has resulted in a perfect context for leveraging complementarity. For the future of environmental peacebuilding, this means brokering collaborations to apply new technologies such as EO to improve climate and conflict analysis and monitoring. Recent EO breakthroughs have improved the temporal and spatial resolution of data. The greater integration and automation of analysis will allow non-technical users to better measure change and improve their decision-making. This, together with capacity-building efforts in digital literacy, is solving the long-standing problem that EO has been an expensive technology only accessible to highly trained scientists.
Planet, a leading environmentally mission-driven earth imagery company, offers some best practices of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for how to achieve these efforts. Planet has improved not only the availability and quality of geospatial data, but also its measurability, which is essential to capture change and impact. In early-warning and disaster risk reduction, for example, Planet has partnered with the EU’s Copernicus Emergency Management System to innovate early warning to floods, droughts, and wildfires by delivering faster analyses of large areas regardless of the time of the day and weather conditions.[iii] Another illustrative case is Planet’s collaboration with the Government of Norway to provide high-resolution data of the world’s tropics with the aim of reducing tropical forest loss and conserving biodiversity.[iv] Making this data publicly accessible not only enabled countries such as Brazil and Colombia to monitor their forests, but also helped Indigenous organizations to protect their territory.
A few lessons learned emerge from Planet’s experience. PPPs can empower end-users with better access to data, contributing to monitoring near-real-time environmental change to support data-informed decision-making. Technology companies with relevant expertise can support capacity building within public organizations and civil society, helping to bridge the lack of skills and resources. PPPs could also be replicated in realms such as livelihoods and security, servicing monitoring to track seasonal transhumance, identifying sites of illegal artisanal mining, timber exploitations, and oil bunkering.
Looking ahead
International actors hoping to address climate-related security risks can focus their attention on two key areas:
Preparing the community of practice to access new digital technologies and analytical techniques by enhancing digital literacy and including climate and security data-driven analysis for programme design. This action represents a necessary investment to ensure that digital technologies can predict and address climate-related security risks. Decision-makers should encourage capacity-building on digital literacy to enhance trust in technologies, especially regarding GIS for its relevance in spatial risk analysis. Digital public goods should be published on a regular basis showing real-time climate-security hotspots and options for nature-based solutions.
Promotion of PPPs to increase complementarity between business development and public missions in support of societal, environmental, and peacebuilding goals. This is needed for the delivery of data-driven climate and conflict analysis, which can only be significantly improved through PPPs where infrastructure and expertise are combined. Policymakers could start by developing standards, norms, and guidance frameworks that foster the emergence of PPPs such as facilitating data-sharing arrangements, enhancing trust-building among stakeholders, and developing licensing agreements and interoperability regimes.
[i] Only in the past three years, the European Green Deal, the EU Foreign Affairs Council Conclusions on Climate and Energy Diplomacy and the EU Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy. In addition, the African Union, the Pacific Islands Forum and the Group of 7 recognized the linkage of the two issues and their newly emerged policies reflect the relationship to promote integrated action.
[ii] The European Council Conclusions on Digitalization for the Benefit of the Environment, the EU Data Strategy, the European Digital Services Act, the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap on Digital Cooperation, the UN Secretary-General’s Data Strategy, the Digital Transformation sub-programme of UNEP’s Medium-Term Strategy and the Global Environment Data Strategy adopted by the UN Environmental Assembly in EA.4/Res.23.
[iii] EU (2021) Copernicus Emergency Management Service (https://emergency.copernicus.eu)
[iv] NICFI (2021) Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (https://www.nicfi.no)