We Are In This Together: Environment and climate actions and efforts for sustaining peace need to go hand in hand

art by Nina Montenegro (USA)

Ulrika Åkesson and Anna Åkerlund (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida)

Sustainable development needs to stay within planetary boundaries and be peaceful, inclusive, and fair. The Swedish development cooperation therefore commits to integrate the environment perspective, conflict sensitivity, gender equality, a rights-based approach, and the perspectives of people living in poverty. These perspectives are also essential for environmental peacebuilding.

Context

With the adoption of the Agenda 2030, Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Development Finance, and the Paris Agreement, international development cooperation needs to relate to and include all three dimensions of sustainable development – economic, social, and environmental. This is the point of entry for the Swedish government’s policy framework for international development cooperation from 2016.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was put forward as a plan for people, planet, and prosperity as well as a contribution to sustaining peace and forging new partnerships. But implementation is lagging, and progress has been stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the meantime, environmental challenges and climate change manifest themselves acutely. The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with conflict, environment, and climate challenges have increased extreme poverty for the first time in a generation. Worldwide, three out of four people in extreme poverty live in fragile, often conflict-affected countries. People living in poverty are more exposed and vulnerable to climate change with less capacity and fewer resources to cope and recover.

Like other global crises, the climate crisis will put a strain on inter- and intrastate collaboration just where it is needed the most. However, we can rise to the challenges, forge partnerships, and secure continued human development and progress in a sustainable way. For that to succeed, the transition to environmentally sustainable development needs to be peaceful, inclusive, and fair.

What’s been done

The challenges of sustainable development are complex and often interlinked. The Swedish Government is committed to integrate five central perspectives throughout the entire Swedish development cooperation. Particularly relevant to environmental peacebuilding are the interlinkages between environmental sustainability and conflict sensitivity. Unless systems and processes for the peaceful management of competing interests and tensions are robust enough to deal with difficulties in coping with climate change or biodiversity loss, such tensions could fuel violence, especially when combined with inequality between groups. Violent conflict causes human suffering and material destruction and poses a serious obstacle to human development, as well as to progress in environment and climate action. This means that climate strategies need to take conflict sensitivity seriously, making sure to minimize negative impacts and maximize the positive impact on peace. Conversely, peace processes and agreements need to integrate environment and climate concerns so that they contribute to building societies that are able to sustain peace in the face of challenges to human security caused by climate change and biodiversity loss.

Three other perspectives are integrated throughout all of Sida’s programmes and projects: the human rights-based approach, gender equality, and the perspectives of people living in poverty. A point of departure is that people living in poverty are agents and can express their needs, interests, and preconditions. They are also rights holders with legal entitlements and can hold duty bearers accountable to comply with commitments, including international obligations within the fields of environment and peace. Women and men, girls and boys are often affected differently by conflict as well as by climate change. Gender equality is both a human right and an important perspective to integrate into all programming in order to ensure that people of all genders benefit equally. Putting the Women, Peace and Security agenda at the centre of environmental peacebuilding helps to establish more inclusive processes and achieve more sustainable results.

Failing to take these five perspectives into account will make it difficult to achieve the development goals and the 2030 Agenda, or contribute towards the overarching objective of Swedish development cooperation: creating the preconditions for better living conditions for people living in poverty and under oppression.

Looking ahead

In 2022, the Government of Sweden will host a high-level meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations conference on the environment, the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The vision is for Stockholm+50 to promote international collaboration accelerating a just and inclusive transition that leaves no one behind. The aim is for Stockholm+50 to drive the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the Paris Agreement, and other international agreements; to reduce inequalities and human insecurity and to benefit people living in poverty. This needs to go hand in hand with more locally led conflict-sensitive action for environment and climate action as well as environment and climate sensitive conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Early warning signals of climate change as a risk multiplier for violent conflict should trigger early preventative action. The international community should make sure that climate action and adaptation strategies are firmly rooted in local realities and ideally designed in a way that contributes to trust-building. Broad involvement of women and men affected by climate change and biodiversity loss as agents of change may strengthen conflict sensitivity. The untapped potential in peacebuilding to contribute to protecting the environment and combating climate change needs to be explored.

In this way, we in the Swedish development cooperation, in partnership with other actors, should contribute to meet the enormous challenges facing us as a global community, and to do it in a way that works for and with people and communities that are most vulnerable. That is not only a moral imperative, but rather, it is more likely to yield sustainable results for the benefit of all.