When: Nov. 2, 2023 10:00am – 11:30am ET
Where: Online event & 6th Floor Flom Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson Center
Climate, peace, and security are deeply interconnected: climate change impacts can exacerbate underlying security risks, like social tensions and loss of livelihoods, and instability weakens adaptation capacities, leaving communities more vulnerable to climate shocks. Responses to climate change can also unwittingly threaten security by fueling corruption, undermining informal land tenure systems, and driving the extraction of minerals in communities that lack environmental and social safeguards. According to Mercy Corps, 18 of the 25 countries most vulnerable to climate change are also conflict-affected.
Over the past two decades, policymakers and practitioners have increasingly recognized climate-conflict links. Less recognized, however, is how climate change responses—including investments in adaptation, capacity building, and meaningful engagement with affected communities—can contribute to peace. This year for the first time, the UN’s annual climate summit (COP28), hosted in Dubai, will include the theme of peace. The explicit focus on peace highlights the peacebuilding potential of climate action that accounts for conflict risks and vulnerabilities—as well as the environmental dividends of peacebuilding: efforts to address climate-change with a conflict-sensitive lens—and efforts to build peace with an environmental dimension—can help build climate resilience and peace together.
Join us in the lead-up to COP28 for a panel discussion on the significance of integrating a peace and security lens at COP—and what kinds of concrete opportunities COP offers to move the needle on climate, conflict, and peace in tandem.