Environmental degradation and climate change increasingly interact with threats to peace and stability around the world. Until now, most attention has focused on researching the links between climate, environment and conflict, while peacebuilding and conservation programming and practice remain relatively siloed. In 2019, we selected Conservation International (CI) as our first-ever partnership with an environmentally-focused organisation to help bridge this divide.
The partner
CI is a large international organisation that works in 29 countries and with a network of more than 2,000 partners. It takes a comprehensive approach to conservation that includes scientific research, policy development, global mobilisation (especially around climate adaptation financing) and operational programmes with local authorities, indigenous people, civil society organisations and businesses. As part of its commitment to ensure human well-being alongside the protection of nature and the environment, CI has been exploring the linkages between its conservation work and peace and conflict issues since 2012. The CI Center for Communities and Conservation (CCC) provides leadership and technical advice on integrating conflict and peace considerations across its work.
Our support
Our partnership with CI started by taking stock of what the organisation had achieved to date on this agenda, and by supporting the design of their next phase of work. This exercise confirmed the relevance of conflict and peace issues to CI’s work, as field staff regularly face conflict when pursuing their conservation work in fragile or violence-affected contexts. It further highlighted how CI has an opportunity to draw on existing tools, knowledge and programming practices to advance conflict-sensitive conservation and environmental peacebuilding as part of its new strategy. This agenda can directly contribute to CI’s overall strategic aims of finding nature-based solutions to climate change, creating sustainable landscapes and seascapes at scale, protecting the oceans and promoting financing for global environmental and conservation problems. CI is therefore well-positioned to influence change and a greater interconnection of conflict, peace and environmental issues both in practice at the local level and internationally through influencing policymakers, scientific debates and business practice.
Three priority areas form the basis of our collaboration. The first relates to further strengthening internal engagement on conflict issues across CI’s programmes and teams. The second focuses on supporting a selection of pilot countries to design, plan and implement particular conflict and peace responses as part of their conservation work. The last priority relates to influencing the broader conservation sector to support the implementation of, and resources for, conflict-sensitive conservation and environmental peacebuilding work.
The results
During 2019, CI achieved important results in all three areas. CI teams in Peru, Kenya and Brazil undertook initiatives to map out particular conflict issues they face and strengthen their own capacities on potential approaches to resolve these. For instance, in Brazil the team conducted a training on conflict analysis and on using restorative peace circles to deal with conflicts related to the Amazon forest. The CCC also assisted in designing a conflict-sensitive, human rights-focused initiative targeting park rangers in Peru, Cambodia and Kenya. CI’s new stakeholder engagement tool was updated to include an entire chapter on peace, and conflict issues have been more regularly discussed at headquarter, regional and team meetings.
Photo credits: 1) Pete Oxford, caption from CI – Essequibo River, Longest river in Guyana, and the largest river between the Orinoco and Amazon. Rising in the Acarai Mountains near the Brazil-Guyana border, the Essequibo flows to the north for 1,010 km through forest and savanna into the Atlantic Ocean. 2) Esteban Barrera, CI, caption: facilitated the inaugural gathering of the Women’s Council of the Amazon, marking decades of hard work to bring about a cultural shift so the voices of women can be heard.
