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Environmental peacebuilding remains a young field but is rapidly evolving. There are still many complexities in the range of issues that it encompasses in dealing with conflict that we need to understand, writes Carl Bruch, an international environmental lawyer and founding president of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, on the last day of the International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding.
Since 1946, at least 40 per cent of all conflicts within states have involved disputes around natural resources. Natural resource-related conflicts are more likely to relapse to conflict, and do so twice as fast. For years, peace agreements rarely included environmental provisions; this has gradually shifted and since 2005, every major peace agreement has addressed the environment, sometimes focusing on causes (such as inequitable land distribution) and sometimes focusing on livelihoods or the toxic remnants of war. Since the end of the Cold War, revenue streams from diamonds, timber, bananas, coltan, and other natural resources have been used to fund more than 35 major armed conflicts.
Environmental peacebuilding seeks to understand the relationship between conflict and the environment and to remove the environmental dimensions of conflict.
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